Earth's second Moon!

Earth has a second moon and you would know that when you get to the bottom of the post. And now that I have your attention, our first Moon, needs quite a bit of mention.

“The night walked down the sky with the moon in her hand.” said Frederic Lawrence Knowles. What would the world be without the moon? Where would the hopeless romantics, the werewolf stories, the convinced astrologers, the questing astronomers and the sci-fi enthusiasts go?Into a vacuum of space that would be created if the moon seizes to exist?

The Moon inspires us all in different ways. Optimists have quoted some memorable lines like “My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon” and “Don't tell me the sky is the limit; there are footprints on the moon!” “The moon's an arrant thief and her pale fire she snatches from the Sun.” writes Shakespeare.

Through time the Moon has stood by Earth, Wolves have howled at the moon for centuries, yet it is still there. An inspiration that stands for eons together, a doorway to fantasy that opens up time and again. Some even think the Moon was put there by an alien race to monitor us. They have some good reasons to come to this seemingly weird conclusion. After all, we are always viewing only 55% of the moon. The orbit of the Moon is such that one rotation is just about as long as one revolution in its orbit around the Earth. Because of this, one side is facing us during its orbit. Always a side, only one side. In theory, the far side of the moon, often referred to as the “dark side” of the moon could easily contain an alien base, as this is the side of the moon that we never ever see, even radio signals are blocked in that area. The “far side” is always hidden, feeding the mystery the fuel it needs to burn! Isaac Asimov once commented that: “There is no astronomical reason why the moon and the sun should fit so well. It is the sheerest of coincidences, and only the Earth among all the planets is blessed in this fashion.” This "coincidence" means that the moon is just the right size and distance, to completely block the sun during an eclipse. Eclipses are infrequent events but are often linked to quite serious earthquakes. Was the moon placed in a very specific orbit by a higher intelligence from another world who wanted to either monitor us as a species or exert an element of control over our planet?

The words 'lunacy", "lunatic", and "loony" are derived from Luna because of the folk belief in the moon as a cause of periodic insanity. “I don't know if there are men on the moon, but if there are they must be using the earth as their lunatic asylum” concludes George Bernard Shaw. The Ancient Chinese say, “When a finger points to the moon, the imbecile looks at the finger”. No wonder, the “Looney Toons” are a big hit everywhere, we are under the power of the great Moon God. It is a feature of modern belief that shapeshifters such as werewolves drew their power from the moon and would change into their bestial form during the full moon.

There are dozens of anomalous facts concerning the moon that science is at a loss to explain, not least of which is how it is that according to the analysis of moon rocks, the moon, is at least a billion years older than the Earth itself. This fact alone seems to defy logic, and is something that modern cosmology is unable to explain, if the moon isn’t a fragment of the Earth, what is it, and how did it get here?

An interesting fact to end this discussion by……3753 Cruithne is an asteroid in orbit around the Sun. Due to its unusual orbit relative to that of the Earth, it is a periodic inclusion planetoid. It is sometimes called "Earth's second moon" although it is not a satellite of the Earth.

One little kiss

One of the favourite of my poems !

A million thoughts and a million words, a lonely emotion
A moment so bizarre, strange and stranger than fiction
An end to death, a beginning to life only at the end
A moment of pure untainted bliss, never one like this
A profound truth, a mystery disentangled, with your one little kiss

Blog title record

Well, if you didn't notice, here is the deal. The title to my blog keeps changing randomly in time but depending on my mood, depending on the article I publish. So I thought it would be really fun, if I put all the blog titles I have changed till now.Like a small blog title record.

So from the top of my mind, let me remember and write some of them down.

1. Perspective India
2. Red is the Colour
3. Watch this space for new headings
4. Atlast, a real blog!
5. Stay Gray . Stay neutral
6. Speaking the Mind
7. Frozen in time
8. In the prison of Happiness
9. Under Massive Reconstruction
10. The Butterfly Effect
11. Into Business of Busyness
12. Chuck It!
13. Surf's Up!
14. We live on a needle point of balance.
15. It's good. Trust me, I wrote it!
16. Perusing Thoughts
17. Pondering over nothing is genius!


List would be updated as and when it should. Can I have this as a blog post? Will somebody be interested. I don't know, I am. Somebody else should be too.

Crisis of Life: My Thesis

Life is simple, it’s just not easy.

I am in a hurry to finish my already stretched to the limit thesis. My only problem is I have a compulsive disorder of getting everything right. And in the mean time, I keep forgetting the golden rule….

"Just do what you need to do to finish"

I keep forgetting that the Master Thesis is not the end of me. It is not supposed to be a master piece. Well, even my Advisor feels I am dwelling too deep into the subject and that I am just not moving forward, but just digging myself deeper. Which is, obviously, not the right direction to move in, if you need to move forward. Unless of course, one is digging through a sphere like earth and you can get from America to China by just digging deep right through the core!

I need some serious help from people who got their thesis done on time, with hard work and the smarts!

I guess I am scared of the defense and I want to cover all of the weaknesses with a strong literature backing. But I guess I can always tell the defense committee if I have a very flimsy explanation for a particular question that, “If you don't buy this explanation, let me remind you that it's the same same explanation you bought a couple of defenses ago.”

Just doing it!

I thought I would start a new section on motivation. Every now and then I would post anything that would motivate my lazy A**! It could work for you even if you are not as lethargic as me!

Here goes number one....
"The Impossible is often the untried."

Happy Independence Day

Happy Independence Day to people I know, and to people I don't but would love to know. I feel proud. I feel proud to be free. I feel proud to be independent. I feel proud to be an independent Indian.

To everyone who feels proud to be an Independent Indian, remember, real independence is about getting to do the right things. Are we ready to do the right things for India?

So what's cooking?

Ask me that question, “Can men cook?” and I would answer, “Yes, we can!” After all the best chefs have always been men, haven’t they? Most of the chefs in multi cuisine restaurants and hotels are after all purely male.Or is it just a tradition we follow, a convention that has lodged into our heads, like a baby monkey to its mom? Because everyone knows how superior the food is when Moms cook! They are few other things to die for. As Barbara Costikyan, U.S. editor and writer, aptly puts it in these words,"In the childhood memories of every good cook, there's a large kitchen, a warm stove, a simmering pot and a mom."

And where would we be without our cooking? The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of an ancient civilization right underneath our feet!

Someday, I am going to get married, hopefully to a wife who has always been a woman, right from the beginning. And hopefully she would know how to cook. But there is a little conundrum attached to it. “There is one thing more exasperating than a wife who can cook and won't and that's a wife who can't cook and will.” As rightly said by Robert Frost! I wonder why his Second name could be “Frost”? Did his forefathers put everything in the freezer and then later defrosted it. They were probably days, when they boiled water, put it in the freezer and then defrosted it. But, it doesn’t really add up, the name then would have read “Robert Defrost”, a more fitting one!

But cooking is easy, if you follow these easy guidelines….
1. Never count your eggs, before you fry them! You could always manage to break a few on the kitchen floor!

2. The early bird gets the worm; you better get her first, because you will have no worm!

3. If you or your wife fall into the second category Robert Frost was talking about, you better get ready to think about this quote by Rodney Dangerfield “Why, her cooking is so bad that the flies pitched in to fix the screen door. I leave dental floss in the kitchen and watch the roaches hang themselves."

I have a friend Mr. M, who cooks beautifully and like most connoisseurs his taste is very exquisite and is only limited in margin to very few things he loves. He is very choosy, I am not. He cooks quite a few stomach pleasers that I love, but he wouldn’t eat it himself, because he doesn’t like to debase himself to the common man’s taste. Whatever dude, you got the magic , I got the eat!

Ponder over this, before you leave ““If a pot is cooking, the frienship will stay warm”

Colours of your dreams

You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'”George Bernard shaw.

Dreams have always fascinated me. And when I mean dreams , it is not the aspirations we have, but the dreams we have when we fall asleep. Before I go on I would like to ask a question, do you dream in colour or do you dream in black and white? Try to answer this before you move on any further.

Dreams actually occur in the entire brain - all at once. Which is to say, there isn't just one area or part of the brain where dreams occur. When scientists first measured activity in our brains during REM sleep (REM stands for rapid eye movement sleep, when dreams occur), they discovered that our brains are as active during dreams as when we are awake. When we dream, our brains are stimulated from the inside, and all our senses are involved. This is why we can see, touch, taste, smell, and hear in our dreams - the entire brain is just as busy as when we are awake!

Recurring dreams let us know that there is an important, unsolved problem in our lives. This is why recurring dreams are especially valuable to try to understand. Our subconscious mind is sending us an urgent message! Here's a fact about recurring dreams that not many people know: If we are able to identify the issue and solve the problem in our waking lives, the recurring dreams will stop. My first question about color in dreams has an interesting history. Historically, no one ever believed dreams were in black and white. In fact, it wasn't until the late 1950s and early 1960s that the question came to be debated. The cause? People were beginning to watch a lot of black and white television in those days, and this made their dreams, on occasion, mimic the black and white worlds that people were seeing on their TVs at night.
The answer to my question, accordingly, is tricky. All people dream in color. The truth is that we only recently began to dream in black and white—after we saw, for the first time, what a "black and white" world would look like. Think about it. If you'd never seen black and white movies and photographs and TV shows, it would be pretty hard to imagine what a "black and white" world would look like. For example, if you lived in the 1850s, and if someone asked you whether you dreamed in color or black and white—the question wouldn't make sense. You'd ask them: "What on Earth do you mean by dreaming in black and white?" Because the only world we knew back then was in full living color.

So far this is true. This means we dream in colour and also in black and white. But why don't we have information of the colour itself, why don't we remember what colour we had in our dreams?

The first thing is that YES it's true there are dreams in which there is no colour, but that is not because they're in black and white!What happens is that in dreaming, the automatic checking systems that go on in the mind are turned off. So, if the queen of England visited and brought a few aliens round for tea you'd probably be working out if you'd got enough cups and whether the biscuits you'd got would be acceptable, rather than thinking that it was a bit odd to be visited by the queen and some aliens.

Also, in dreams, things which aren't relevant are just UNSPECIFIED, and there are no alarm bells to flag up that something is MISSING. So, when you're flying on a magic carpet, you can't necessarily say which shoes you might have been wearing.

But not being able to tell what shoes you had on does not imply you were barefoot. This is what happens with the COLOUR situation. In a dream, where the colour of something is relevant, you see colour, but where the colour is not relevant, there is NO COLOUR INFORMATION. But that doesn't mean it's in black&white.This is the same way, why we remember only one person we talked to in a crowded room. We remember the room was crowded, but we remember no other person than the one we talked to.

It is this, the fact that "missing" information is not noticed to be missing, that fools the conscious mind on waking up into concluding that therefore by implication the dream must have been in black and white, whereas in fact it was just that colour wasn't important in that particular dream.

Beauty and the Beast

I am back from my India trip. And there are some experiences I need to share. Well, as always there are two sides of the coin, the beauty and the beast. The beast no matter how ferocious is always belittled by the Beauty of India. So here are the two…

Episode 1: Day of Departure

The Beauty: Everything is all packed, for the first time I am actually ready about 5 hours before my flight.

The Beast: Air India is going to be late as it is our indian custom, delayed from 7:30 pm to 9:30 pm.

The Beauty: A nice friend agreed to drop us at the airport.

The Funny Beast: We reach the airport, at 6:30 pm. I ask at the Air India counter, what time would the flight be actually in air. The official replies it’s “on time”. Scares the living hell out of me. I am sure they have cancelled my reservation. And I ask dejected, “At 7.30 pm?” Official replies, “No Sir, rescheduled to 9:30 pm Sir, on time Sir.” I am so glad “on time” in India, is about 2 hours later.

The Beauty: Nice dinner on flight.

The Beast: Since I was flying to Chennai then to Hyderabad, the in-flight movie is in Tamil, the blockbuster “Pokri”.

The Beauty: We had English subtitles, and the lead actress was way too hot!

The Beauty: We land in Chennai to a very pleasant weather. Nice South Indian breakfast follows.

The Beast: The Indian Airlines flight from Hyderabad to Chennai is late by an hour.

The Beauty: I found this cute little girl about 10 years old, traveling all on her own from Chennai to Delhi. So young, so confident and so independent. I wish I have a daughter just like her.

The Beauty: The Spice Jet employees look really hot in their designer red pants and shirt. Living up to their names.

The Beast: I wasn’t traveling by Spice.

The Beauty: “On time” delay of one hour and I am at my home, my Hyderabad.

This is how banks fleece you

No free lunches. Your bank might be offering you more services than ever, but someone has to be paying for them. And more likely than not, it is you. So, feel free to ask. Also, read forms you sign. Till 1999, the Indian Banks' Association used to fix charges. But since banks were freed to have their own charges, numerous charges have crept in. It is pretty difficult and, often, unnecessary to track them all. In most bank branches, charges for regular services are displayed fairly conspicuously. What is not as much in public display are the penalties, such as those levied for not maintaining the minimum balance and quarterly average balance and overdrawing from the savings account. According to a BBC report published in December 2006, that year, the top six high street banks in the UK earned an estimated pound 4.5 billion (approx Rs 36,000 crore) only from penalty charges incurred for unauthorised overdrafts, bounced cheques and clearing direct debits when there are insufficient funds in the account. While no such figure is available for Indian commercial banks, industry sources estimate that it could be around Rs 3,000 per annum for an account in a private sector bank. (See: Biting charges). For the banks, it is like hitting the jackpot. Things to do * Close accounts you don't use. If you open one as a requirement for term deposits, go for a no-frill account. But even one of these, if it lets you have a zero balance, may charge you for frequent cash withdrawals. The cheque facility is also free only up to a number of cheques. * Check every service you are using and ask the bank whether they are costing you anything. * Overall, use ATMs, Internet banking and phone banking. Most of it is free and can save charges for services such as 'stop payment' of a cheque, or transferring money from one bank to another when the amount is above Rs 100,000. * Maintain quarterly average balance at all times. Keep track of automatic payouts and post-dated cheques. Else it could cost you up to Rs 750 in a private bank. Also, a bounced cheque can lead to criminal prosecution under law. * Also keep track of all your consolidate student loan schemes, refinancing,debt consolidation,equity home loan schemes.

Marriage Counseling

Marriage is in the air. Or was it love is in there air? Whichever, it’s got to be one of them ,in some cases,both together. With Ash and Abhi getting married, and the whole media going crazy…that’s what I gather when I see the e-newspapers from out here, it was about time I seriously look into the institute of marriage. Ash took her time to get married didn’t she? How old is she, 35? Well, as George Carlin observed...."I am" is reportedly the shortest sentence in the English language. Could it be that "I do" is the longest sentence? Seems that’s how the ball bounces nowadays. “I do’s” are getting really harder and longer. And seriously, people really need to get married early. There is no point in wasting time, in order to find a person that you can annoy for the rest of your life. Did I type “annoy” back there, sorry, the right word is “infuriate”. At last you will have someone who will tolerate you for your money, oops… for your love and affection.

And getting married is not easy. It is like going to buy a car. You somehow save up for a MERCEDES S-class; you buy it, and then realize that your neighbor has a BMW M5 which is faster, flashier, prettier and more reliable. Ditto goes for ladies too. I mean, it’s like they go out shopping, and then realize they need to buy one particular gorgeous set of shoes. Eventually they buy them, and then realize that they don’t go with any of their dresses. Ladies beware; buy a tailor-made man who matches all your inner needs and desires! And yes if you are not vigilant, you will most likely be the man/ woman who would say, "I never knew what real happiness was until I got married; by then it was too late."

Well, after what’s done is done, you know, after getting married somehow and barely managing to live it up. Things can eventually look brighter; after all marriage is the process of finding out what kind of person your spouse would have really preferred.A very smart husband will never let go of his wife’s hand in public. The wife feels very comforted, and the husband knows she can’t shop. And the wife makes sure the game of love is played on even grounds. No jewelry, no warmth and care.

As time goes by, even with the mutual benefit to each, a lot of marriages do break down. As someone once said, in America if a marriage lasts for longer than the milk takes time to sour than it is a success. An exaggeration nevertheless, but isn’t it true that you never know them until you marry them? Its like a shiny gift wrapped box, of infinite possibilities. As another anonymous guy said “I married Miss Right. I just didn't know her first name was Always”
But before I go, I would like to warn all women….with this Mae West quote, “Do not marry a man to reform him. That is what reform schools are for."

One last kiss

Virtual cobwebs in my chat window, signifying you haven't been in here for long now
I just hope u do reply, dont want you to just read, smile and turnaway
better late than ever, you know i will keep waiting, you know i will be the last man standing
addicted to you i am to a lot of extent, simple to seem be my wish to see you, but ungranted
scar me not , my little scarlett, sweeten me with them sugary dimples once more
I cry one little smile, I die one little death in bliss, just seal my coffin with one little kiss.