A Marriage in the wildnerness

It was quite sometime since I went out on a long drive and every time I looked at my Avy, it was as if it was begging me to take her out in the open.....I too was itching for an uninterrupted drive devoid of those traffic snarls and the honking and also for a short adventure trip.

Then came this thought..Why shouldn't I travel to Mysore out. Yes it was just Mysore and nothing else. Not supposed to be quite exciting, but then there was this opportunity to throttle out free. There was a marriage party at Gudalur and I was supposed to join my parents at Majestic railway station early in the morning so as to board the Mysore express coming from Chennai. I was already riddling myself on as to how to reach over there @ 4 AM. Then, the previous day, I solved it. I was going to drive across and park my bike at my colleague's place and then join my parents and bro at the railway station.

So, next day, I took out my backpack, stuffed in some clothes and then was off @ 4:30. I was confused on as to whether I should take the Nice Road or should I go to Kengeri via the usual road, the reason being that Nice Road will be deserted at such early hours..but then I braved myself and ventured on. Nice Road came up in a very short time and when I cruised my Avy to 80+, the helmet started to wiggle up and down and was gyrating too much. I tried adjusting, but then it wasn't of much use. I kept to 90 and at times reached 110 over short stretches careful to ensure I was under control. The backpack too, was shifting onto the left side, blocking my rear view mirror. I accelerated on, although skeptical with a little degree of uncomfortness but the smoothness of my bike and my willingness for the early morning air nudged me on.

Upon reaching Kengeri, I adjusted the gear once again and the other view mirror. It was better, but something was still not right and I couldn't find out what was wrong. I wasn't comfy and the ride seemed rusty. The visibility was getting better bit by bit and in a few minutes, I wouldn't need to pull back my visor. After about 3o kms, I stopped. Enough is enough. Either ride comfortably or dont ride. This drive seemed as good as driving @ 10 aM in bangalore city through the traffic. "This is not what you wanted sid..." - I told myself. I checked what was wrong. Helmet - Yeah - the Visor cover had given way in the wind and was wobbling, the knob had come off - I adjusted it and It was OK. Next thing - My Mirror - took out my tool kit - tightened it and there it was - perfect view...! Next was my backpack which was slipping towards the left side - The weight of the bag was not an issue...The straps were. I adjusted them out first left them loose. It was good for some distance but then the straps came off my shoulder..!lol - It was just too loose..I couldn't feel the weight at all,as it was completely resting on the rear seat, but then - It was getting out of my shoulder in the wind. It finally dawned on me what was wrong! I just had to tighten the straps!!!!!...! phew - it worked. And off I was..finally. I slowly unleashed her and she was responding as if a cheetah was left free after a week in the cage. 90...100...110...120 and then 125...! never could go beyond that..! something or the other crept up....But I was happy that I had worked her out. A chai at Mandya ..after filling up fuel and was cleaning my helmet visor as the morning insects had rammed and died...!and my mom called up saying she had reached Maddur. ! Sh.... - didnt tell her I was biking - she would start cribbing..! But I knew I had to catch up or they would overtake me.!

I revved up again...Soon I reached Mysore.

The trip to bandipur was exciting. Two other people who accompanied us, apart from my family were my uncle's friends..! One face seemed deeply familiar - I realized it was none other than my professor at college - Dr. T. Murugavel. I picked up conversation and then I found that he became involved with my uncle through Wildlife activities. Throughout the trip we were engaged in deep conversations and great man he is, went sharing with us his activities on saving the endangered Olive Ridleys at the beaches in chennai and the save black buck campaign..! He also shared with us his findings on why the house sparrows are becoming endangered in chennai.

As we entered Bandipur, the terrain changed. We entered into the forest, but the forest was surprisingly devoid of the greenery it normally present itself with. The last time when I had driven to Wayanad, the greenery was enchanting. I was puzzled at this greyish picture Bandipur had painted itself with. As we trudged along, the temperature was getting warmer...! Even more puzzling. I was trying to come terms with what I was coming across with this strangeness when we suddenly stopped. They had spotted an elephant. And in the distance she was..! A lone female....sucking in and throwing mud on her back and lazing herself near a waterhole.! It was quite a distance and with the 75-300mm we couldnt zoom in to her quite enough! We ventured bit nearer and then came her calf...running to her in mock fury cos she seemed to have left her..! and then closely following the calf was another big female..! We spent some time taking pictures and then drove on..!

The Gray Langur monkeys are common in these parts and It wasnt difficult to come across them. ! There were lots..unaffected by the traffic and the sound of the horns that the traffic creates..! They seemed to have pretty well adjusted to this and find solace closer to the roads..! They posed very nicely for the photographs.

We reached our homestay near Gudalur. It was a cosy little place tucked up on a little raised construction by the roadside good enough to grant us with a nice mountain view of the nilgris. We had to hit the road soon again and we were back at the camp lodge for the evening activities.!

back to blog postings again!...!

My list of 10 All time greatest songs....

Here it is ....my own list of top 10 list of my favourite all time english songs...
b4 i publish my list...which i am thinking of, i need a bit of help here...please come up with your own suggestions...i am thinking of top 10 - but cant go below 30...well need some more time...sorry..but i am publishing the unedited list now..this will be reviewed.

10. Nelly Furtdo - Powerless

Amazing song, great lyrics, music's too good...furtado's shot to fame song..i can listen to this again and again.

watch the desi remix..

09. The Man who sold the world - Nirvana

I like this song from nirvana more than teen spirit.. amazing guitar work..cool music..
u start tapping to this song..liked it the first time i listened to it..not all songs are like this you know..!!

08. Norah Jones - Sweet Words

the sweetest song........music - as beautiful as norah herself...cant simply imagine the way music has come up...great..hats off to norah.. "humble me" came close..but..this ones the best

07. MLTR - that's why you go away

Certain songs are in a separate class . you cant reach out to them. and that's why...is easily in that catergory listings.. 50 years from now...this song will still be heard...better than tony braxton's unbreak my heart.

06. Stairway to heaven - led zeplin

 listen, appreciate, enjoy...i once listened to this 30 times non-stop....and went to sleep...u can write a book appreciating this song.

05. Truly Madly Deeply - Savage Garden

One of My first love songs which i listened to in english ....and it was amazing..maybe it came during my teenage years..but when i listen to this song..i am still taken to an unknown place in my dreams...

04. Tears in heaven - Eric Clapton

Clapton wrote this song when his 4 year old son fell out of his 53rd story window and died in New york city.

Would you know my name?
If I saw you in heaven!

brings tears right????
listen to it - you will cry....

03. Desparado - Eagles all the way

You better let somebody love you....
thats how this song ends...and it begins with - why dont you come to your senses....this song was never released as a single...but still became popular...because this one's far ahead of time..100 years from now - it will be the greatest all time song..mark my words..hats off to don henley..

02. Tequila Sunrise - Eagles

Love, friendship, tragedy, happiness and some tequila. This is what this song's all about...this song is so beautiful..just cant get enough words to describe this....no song can be so pure as this..HFO really happens...great lyrics...and the music... 3:15 of absolute pristine bliss...and those who take the shot of courage...maybe the right words would come :)

01. Hotel California - Eagles

If god gave us music..we have to thank him...Hotel California is mankinds gift to GOD. This is how we repay him..

here's an article on SM....i thought it was good, so I am  basically copy-pasting it!

It shouldn't have won

 
Sandipan Deb 

Tue, Feb 24 04:45 AM

Frankly, I don't think Slumdog Millionaire deserved the Oscar for best film. And even more frankly, I don't think Resul Pookutty should have invoked "my country and my civilisation" in his acceptance speech for best sound mixing. India was not up there in the Kodak auditorium for approval. It was a British film financed by the indie subsidiary of an American studio which happened to be set in India and as a result they could not help but involve Indian actors (including Indian-origin Britishers) and shoot it in India. We crave too much for international recognition. A bit too much than is seemly. Even as all of us go around strutting, pretending to be a superpower.

Other than Slumdog, I have seen only one film out of the other four nominated. But I've read about all of them. The one that I saw is The Reader. The subject is far more intellectually challenging, emotionally moving and morally disturbing than Slumdog can ever hope to be. Not since A Last Tango In Paris has nudity (both male and female) been so necessary to a film's narrative, and so non-titillating and so touching. A film which stretches over 30 years and with essentially only two characters, and yet a film that is as gripping as a thriller. It's a film that, as my friend told me, demands and requires to be seen in one sitting, with no interruption by commercials and visits to the loo.

But look at the themes of the other movies that were nominated this year. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, the love story of a man who is born as an extreme geriatric and keeps getting younger and dies as a newborn. Only for a brief period of time are the man and his beloved around the same compatible age. Of course it's an impossible concept and completely unbelievable, but it's a high concept. Milk is about the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the United States; Frost/Nixon about the first interview disgraced US President Richard Nixon gave, to has-been TV journalist David Frost. For both of them, it is a chance for redemption, for a somewhat sane life. These are all big themes. I am not doubting Slumdog's quality as a film in any way. Danny Boyle is one of the most talented directors around. But comparing Slumdog to The Reader is almost impossible. It's like comparing A Christmas Carol to Great Expectations.

Scrooge won, little Pip lost. But that's the way it has been with the Oscars. Sometimes the nominations reflect the mood of America's liberals, sometimes the winners reflect political correctness. In 2006, the following five films were nominated: Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback Mountain, Crash, Capote and Munich. Good Night and Good Luck is about a TV broadcaster who took on the McCarthyist witch hunt in the 1950s; essentially about freedom of the press. Brokeback Mountain deflated the entire mythology of uber-macho frontiersmen by portraying a deep homosexual relationship between two cowboys. Crash interlinked several stories to study racism in all its forms and in startling ways. Capote was about the gay writer Truman Capote who travels to the South of the US to write a book on two multiple murderers. Munich told the story of the Israeli agents who hunted down the Black September terrorists who killed Israeli athletes during the Munich Olympics, and asked the question: To take revenge, do we become as base as the men who are our targets?

There's a clear pattern: anger over the Iraq war, the stifling of the media, the stranglehold of neo-conservatism, the contempt for minorities. The denizens of Hollywood were simply reacting to their world as they saw it. The other major critically-acclaimed movies of that year were Transamerica, about one man's battle to change his gender, and Syriana, which told Americans that their nation's policies were largely responsible for Islamist terrorism.

Then there's political correctness. Gandhi won Best Picture over ET. The Academy decided that the biopic of a great and influential leader was more "important" than the woes of a cute alien stranded on our planet. (This incensed Steven Spielberg so much that he decided to give the Academy the "important" films they felt comfortable with, and made The Colour Purple - which didn't win any Oscars - and Schindler's List - which raked them in.) Tom Hanks won his first best acting Oscar for Philadelphia, as much for his acting as for being the first major star to portray a gay man suffering from AIDS. In Hollywood, that's called "courage".

So The Reader can't win. After all, its female protagonist is a former Auschwitz guard who let 300 Jews burn alive in a locked church. The film's position on morality is too nuanced for the general Academy member to grapple with with any success. But Kate Winslet can be given the award for best actress. By taking this controversial role and baring her body so naturally for the purposes of art, she has shown "courage". Milk is about homosexuality, so Sean Penn gets the statuette for "courage", but not the film. Benjamin Button, which was co-produced by its star Brad Pitt, is probably seen as too much the case of an actor showing off, while being aided by more-than-state-of-the art visual effects. Frost/Nixon? Who's interested?

So Slumdog has won, and we should really rejoice for the six children who acted in it, for they are the real stars of the film. We should rejoice for AR Rahman, though the music he has got his two Oscars for is not even of his average quality, forget his sublime and exhilarating stuff. But the Academy has decided. But I really think it's a bit too much if we take this as a victory for Indian cinema. It's a non-Indian film which happened to have an all-Indian cast. We shoot entire films abroad nowadays, especially in the US, remember?

The writer is the editor of the RPG Group's soon-to-be-launched current affairs and features magazine, 'Open'.

warping space time travel!

Antimatter sounds like the stuff of science fiction, and it is. But it's also very real. Antimatter is created and annihilated in stars every day. Here on Earth it's harnessed for medical brain scans. 

"Antimatter is around us each day, although there isn't very much of it," says Gerald Share of the Naval Research Laboratory. "It is not something that can be found by itself in a jar on a table."

So Share went looking for evidence of some in the Sun, a veritable antimatter factory, leading to new results that provide limited fresh insight into these still-mysterious particles.

Simply put, antimatter is a fundamental particle of regular matter with its electrical charge reversed. The common proton has an antimatter counterpart called the antiproton. It has the same mass but an opposite charge. The electron's counterpart is called a positron.

Antimatter particles are created in ultra high-speed collisions. 

One example is when a high-energy proton in a solar flare collides with carbon, Share explained in an e-mail interview. "It can form a type of nitrogen that has too many protons relative to its number of neutrons." This makes its nucleus unstable, and a positron is emitted to stabilize the situation.

But positrons don't last long. When they hit an electron, they annihilate and produce energy. 

"So the cycle is complete, and for this reason there is so little antimatter around at a given time," Share said.

The antimatter wars

To better understand the elusive nature of antimatter, we must back up to the beginning of time.

In the first seconds after the Big Bang, there was no matter, scientists suspect. Just energy. As the universe expanded and cooled, particles of regular matter and antimatter were formed in almost equal amounts. 

But, theory holds, a slightly higher percentage of regular matter developed -- perhaps just one part in a million -- for unknown reasons. That was all the edge needed for regular matter to win the longest running war in the cosmos.

"When the matter and antimatter came into contact they annihilated, and only the residual amount of matter was left to form our current universe," Share says.

Antimatter was first theorized based on work done in 1928 by the physicist Paul Dirac. The positron was discovered in 1932. Science fiction writers latched onto the concept and wrote of antiworlds and antiuniverses. 

Potential power

Antimatter has tremendous energy potential, if it could ever be harnessed. A solar flare in July 2002 created about a pound of antimatter, or half a kilo, according to new NASA-led research. That's enough to power the United States for two days.

Laboratory particle accelerators can produce high-energy antimatter particles, too, but only in tiny quantities. Something on the order of a billionth of a gram or less is produced every year.


Nonetheless, sci-fi writers long ago devised schemes using antimatter to power space travelers beyond light-speed. Antimatter didnt get a bad name, but it sunk into the collective consciousness as a purely fictional concept. Given some remarkable physics breakthrough, antimatter could in theory power a spacecraft. But NASA researchers say it's nothing that will happen in the foreseeable future.

Meanwhile, antimatter has proved vitally useful for medical purposes. The fleeting particles of antimatter are also created by the decay of radioactive material, which can be injected into a patient in order to perform Positron Emission Tomography, or PET scan of the brain. Here's what happens: 

A positron that's produced by decay almost immediately finds an electron and annihilates into two gamma rays, Share explains. These gamma rays move in opposite directions, and by recording several of their origin points an image is produced. 

Looking at the Sun

In the Sun, flares of matter accelerate already fast-moving particles, which collide with slower particles in the Sun's atmosphere, producing antimatter. Scientists had expected these collisions to happen in relatively dense regions of the solar atmosphere. If that were the case, the density would cause the antimatter to annihilate almost immediately.

Share's team examined gamma rays emitted by antimatter annihilation, as observed by NASA's RHESSI spacecraft in work led by Robert Lin of the University of California, Berkeley.

The research suggests the antimatter perhaps shuffles around, being created in one spot and destroyed in another, contrary to what scientists expect for the ephemeral particles. But the results are unclear. They could also mean antimatter is created in regions where extremely high temperatures make the particle density 1,000 times lower than what scientists expected was conducive to the process.

Details of the work will be published in Astrophysical Journal Letters on Oct. 1.

Unknowns remain

Though scientists like to see antimatter as a natural thing, much about it remains highly mysterious. Even some of the fictional portrayals of mirror-image objects have not been proven totally out of this world. 

"We cannot rule out the possibility that some antimatter star or galaxy exists somewhere," Share says. "Generally it would look the same as a matter star or galaxy to most of our instruments."

Theory argues that antimatter would behave identical to regular matter gravitationally.

"However, there must be some boundary where antimatter atoms from the antimatter galaxies or stars will come into contact with normal atoms," Share notes. "When that happens a large amount of energy in the form of gamma rays would be produced. To date we have not detected these gamma rays even though there have been very sensitive instruments in space to observe them."