The DORMANT volcano

The term Volcano emerges from the word Vulcan, the Roman god of forging and metal works, also known as Hephaestus of Greek mythology. But the volcano I will be talking about is very different than what we have in our prejudicial notions, but none the less dangerous than the one which knocked the living daylights out of Pliny the younger when it burst forth. You will be surprised at the picture:

Well, if you are surprised, then I am happy. Burning leaves leave burning holes in our atmosphere. Yes, people might question my sanity, but a poet’s mind that I have, never allows my conscience to ignore such details.

In India particularly where I live, people burn fallen leaves, everyday in fall, in amounts of thousands of burning heaps. Considering the population of India, you can foretell the amount being burned in front of their houses. I have seen much of this, and it is so irritating to watch them burn under a tree destroying the one that they came from. Why is this enmity? I have no idea.

  

Every morning when I wake up, I try to breathe in the fresh air, so free of pollutants and full of bright shining dew. But it is ugly to know that you need to wake before the sun in order to breathe the good one, for apparently it has been fouled by fuming heaps of burning leaves. And then comes the vehicular traffic and a day in India full of pollutants ensues. No breathers. We are trying to catch up to China aren’t we? Aren’t we trying to exceed in economic growth, basking in glory that we were least affected by the recession in global markets?

Aren’t we trying to make money and hoard it, so that we can hope to bribe God with it? It ain’t gonna work mate. No shortcuts in front of god.

Leaves, dead or alive, have been there before our ancestors learned to speak in words. In fact, it has been the first of firsts that propagated life on dry land. Yet, I don’t know why, we still are so intent to destroy them after they die. Why? Are leaves such a big nuisance? What bad have they done that we punish them, and burn them, and cut their bearers from the stem? Leaves give a natural comfy touch to whatever they cover, like a redwood forest in autumn, has inspired so many poets and authors to write memorabillia about them, notably P.B. Shelley, in his poem The West wind. However, we still try to destroy this poet’s important equipment of imagination.

Apart from these romantic ideas, burning leaves leaves the atmosphere with unhealing wounds. They, how many times have our good scientists repeated this, give away Carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, and when they are burned in heaps, Nitrogen dioxide. It happens so because, in heaps, the temperature at the centre can well exceed 1000K, and at such temperatures, Nirtogen can combine with oxigen to form Nitrous oxide, and Nitrogen dioxide. These oxides, as we know, are acidic in nature and float up in the atmosphere and condesnse along with water to make HNO₃, Nitirc acid. It causes acid rain, and destroys a myriad of things

 My countries pride, the Taj mahal, has lost its sheen, and its credit goes to these nonsense of burning leaves, and industries too.

And this is just the beginning, my friends.

We should try and limit whatever we can of the pollution, the foulery, that we do to the earth. Be it restricting the use of cars, or you know, using the bicycle while going to the supermarket, and the sort, but we must do something.

Leaves are an important part of compost, and leaf mold. The dead leaves can be used to grow more trees in a healthy manner, because all biodegradable substances can oxidise to from “compost”. Thus, if every individual can make a small compost pit, or give away the raw materials, which of course include that of dead leaves, then he makes an important contribution for Earth, not against it. It no only generates more compost for agriculture, it also makes an industry, where people can find work, and live.

So, I ask you all in a humble voice, unite against this evil! Make use of the gifts of nature! Join in with me to tell people about this problem, and explain the uses and the good things of composting and collecting dead leaves. Don’t burn leaves, and don’t allow them to be burned, except in areas where forest fires take place.

It doesn't in my backyard.

There are 6 billion people on the planet earth. If each collects even a 100 gram leaves, it gives us more than 6 million tonnes of compost every year. More trees. MORE LIFE!

Join me in this voice!

See for yourselves:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compost   

An Injury can ruin!

Aaron Ramsey is wonderful player.
If Fabregas leaves Arsenal for Barcelona, I am sure Ramsey would be a super replacement for him. However, On February 27, 2010, He conceded a horrific tackle from Ryan Shawcross straight on his shins, and now lies in a hospital with his tibia and fibula fractured.

I couldn't post a picture, but I am posting this video, courtesy YouTube.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E9i1NBLSyxI

If you have the will, then see this, for I certainly don't want to see this thing happen again. It is so unjustified, that Ramsey get that injury. HE is 19! Why should he be so unlucky? He is apt to step in the shoes of Cesc Fabregas, but all of a sudden he is now fighting for his career.

I know this unfairness of God, but I am sure that he has planned something better for Ramsey. Surely, I pray for him, and I know you would too!

About that challenge, well it's a contact sport you know. It could have been worse, there have been worse, but thank god nothing else happened. Shawcross though could have prevented that from happening because evidently, he could have stopped that sliding clear. Ramsey is inexperienced, and he just could not come in properly, and was second best in the challenge. Shawcross didn't have any malice intended from that challenge though. I think he should recompose himself, and drop by Ramsey to apologies.

'Let Us Dream, Ladies and Gentlemen!'

‘Let us learn to dream, ladies and gentlemen, and then perhaps we shall learn the truth. But let us beware of making our dreams public before they have been approved by the waking mind’. So said Friedrich August Kekulé, nigh 120 years ago. If people don’t know him, that’s really a shame. He was one of those free born scientific minds, which wander through the jungles of uncovered information, to find the treasure of truth.

And, if you haven’t read your aromatic hydrocarbons chapter yet, he told us how the Benzene molecule must look like.

It is very interesting to know how he got the idea of the molecule. One fine day he was sitting in his study, with the question rambling through his mind, ‘how does the benzene look like’. Of course, he had some leads, the reactions, the percentage masses, the peculiar behaviours, and of course, ah! The smell!

However, like many before him, he did not have any idea, as to how to connect this jumbled piece of information together. So, not getting anywhere, he dozed off. Now, the humorous quotient aside, it happened to him in the dream of that sleep, that he saw the benzene molecules floating across his mind. He writes later, “Again, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes. This time the smaller groups kept modestly in the background. My mental eye, rendered more acute by repeated visions of this kind, could now distinguish larger structures of manifold conformations; long rows, sometimes more closely fitted together; all twisting and turning in snake like motion. But look! What was that? One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled around me mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I woke…”

 

Lo! There was the birth of Benzene! Kekulé then spent the night working out the necessary details and consequences of the structure, and it occurred to him, that it must be right. X-ray studies indicate that the benzene structure is indeed the one he proposed. Coincidence? Indeed, if anything called coincidence exists in this world! The structure, I think, was revealed to Kekulé much the same way as God revealed himself to Moses.

How otherwise can you explain the dream and the correctness? Kekulé had no leads whatsoever going into the problem; it is only by coincidence that he found that structure.

These incidents reinforce my faith in science. It indicates to us that we are indeed headed onto the right track, with the full blessings of the almighty! After all, aren’t we deciphering the tumultuous mysteries that exist in his creations? Aren’t we deciphering him?

Yes. And we are on the right track.

Flopenhagen

The Cop15 Copenhagen summit got over very recently at Copenhagen, capital of Denmark.

The Copenhagen Accord, accepted and acknowledged by many countries, was the outcome of it. Let us inspect on it.

Having read the Copenhagen Accord, I came to some conclusions which are:

It does not legally bind whatever it says. Countries can violate it without sanctions.

It does not assure the world or any country as to how and where the funds it proposes would go.

It does not indicate the reduction in per capita emissions.

However it does have some merits.

The Accord recognizes the importance of afforestation to control emissions. Hm.... Perhaps someone else was shouting hoarse at the same thing for many more years.

It also establishes a Technology Mechanism to accelerate the development of sustainable technologies. I think this is the only good outcome from the COP15.

It does not specify the peaking limits of many countries.

If peaking limits were only reduced , for the currently developed countries, to levels of the now-developing countries, the world would be a happier place.

Thus is how the Copenhagen Summit resulted; it was an utter failure. It failed the hopes of many people who thought that now would be time when eveything else would be resolved. But it didn't turn out that way.

Except for the Afforestation adress there was nothing more to take not of. Where is the mechanism? Where to invest? How much more time? Nothing was specified.

Such outsomes in meeting may only result in more loss of time. A more equitable method and mechanism needs to be developed in this regard.

No wonder this dampened the spirits of many climate activists, I am certainly not very happy with it. That is why perhaps it is now being called "Flopenhagen".

The sounds of the Universe

Our Universe is vast. It is nothing yet everything. Absolute.

We often imagine it to be empty and nothingness. It is just empty in between stars, separated by light years of void. But it is not so! It is vibrant, it is beautiful. It is the best creation of the God. No wonder why we are so insignificant in comparison with it.

It is huge, while we lie beside a small star, almost invisible to its grandness.

The Universe is a three-dimensional canvas for God, filled with miraculous creations. I would think of astronomers as the great connoisseurs of God's great astronomical works. The creations slowly metamorphose in time, changing their forms from one to another. A great visual delight for the true sight of the infinite power.

Where there is none, we simply think as nothingness. But it is not so. Humans as we are, we can only wonder at the marvelous mystique surrounding the surrealist works. God shrink's Salvador Dali, the best surrealist in our human perceptions, to a mere bystander beside his works.

The way to wonder at God's works is not only through eyes, but eyes and paper too.

James Clerk Maxwell, Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, are only a few of many who provided fundamental insight into the ways and creations of the God.

And one of them states that even the nothingness of the universe encompasses its existence.

The Universe has a vibration, even where it has no visible matter. That vibration is the magical essence of the universe. It is caused by the ground state fluctuations of oscillating quantized-fields in the Universe, and such fields include the Yang-Mills field of strong and weak interactions.

As this concept of ground state fluctuations is valid for all gauge theories, let us take the photonic ripples of the spacetime in a Maxwell elcectromagnetic field. The stars around the universe are radiating and emitting EM radiation over a wide range of wavelengths, and this radiations are abound in the universe. I ask myself, cannot these seemingly endless space allow the radiations to cancel, amplify and mix themselves into one resonating frequency all over this Universe?

May not it be that our Universe mixes all waves to one single vibration, which is fairly constant all over the Universe?

Many thinkers have thought about this. For example the Chinese thinkers think of the mysterious energy force Chi. Can't this chi be resonated with this Universal vibration?

Yes It can!

If we go on about vibrations, then other notable thinking and practical use is of the Hindu Rishis. The use of the syllable "Om" in meditation isn't just hocus-pocus ideas. It is a concept deeply thought! While pronouncing the word, the body feels a deep vibration coming from deep within, even as the eye seeks whilst it surveys the creation of God. In music, the best classical musics really do bring about that dreamy state of mind, as I find myself unto now. The correct beat, the right tones and right fluctuation can bring us forth this Universal rumble, which mea permeate the very fabric of reality.

And thus this is the sound of the Universe! The masterpiece of the heavenly Maestro!

How can we we enjoy this? Just switch on some great Mozart or Beethhoven or Bach, you will surely find the gauge field permeating through you.

And then you will feel, the world giving away, and you enjoying the secret pleasures of the vibration. Jai Guru deva..... OM ......

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Ministocracy

In India, the world marvels at a great democracy; but such democracy-maniacs, and you can count me in them too, are in for a true shock. It appears, as evidently as sunlight on a sunny day, that India is more of a ministocracy.

See, in India, we don't run the government. The government runs us, i. e. drives us mad. In India, it is not by the people, for the people, to the people. It is rather by the people, to the ministers, for the ministers. At least that is what the boiling underbelly of the Indian bourgeoisie says: we elect ministers, but they suck.

Just come to Nagpur this winter and you will see why.

Nagpur is a city in central India, without much of a fanfare, but it stirs when our derisory ministers come and our local babus (or local bhaus), which literally means our great Administrators, wake from their slumber and realise that the city is a little to bad in condition to welcome them. So they start work in hectic schedules that leave the citizenry baffled and add to woes of already congested roads and make them even more congested.

In short, whatever they do, only increases the troubles.

I know what the people think about them: ludicrous paunch-displays. But I don't know what misconception they have about themselves; perhaps they think that they are some sort of elite.

Let me tell you, that the the word minister is known from c.1300. It literally means "one who acts upon the authority of another". It come from Old French ministre meaning "servant" and Latin minister or ministri meaning "servant or chiefly priest's assistant " . From early 16th century it means subordinate or a subordinate to the crown.

In general, this displays what actually the word means, and those who are attested to the word must do. They are the servant of the people, serving for the well being of the society and of the people who have entrusted the administration of their country to the hands of the individuals.

Any common man would know how that administration is: corrupt, inefficient, illegible, and ridiculous.

However, this is not to mention the way they take on the various issues of the country.

A few months ago, a book by Mr. Jaswant Singh, Jinnah : India-Partition-Independence, caused so much furore, that our ministers lost sleep and shouted hoarse debating the legitimacy of history. But they were all blissfully asleep every other time. This is indeed a grave problem to our ministocracy: everything for the ministers, yet highly inefficient.

How highly inefficient?

Greatly, tremendously, incredibly inefficient. I mean, would you call a government who could not ascertain a way to mitigate the problem of electric power shortfalls? Who are blatantly biased towards their own communities? NO!

It has been over 2 years now, that Maharashtra region is facing load shedding power cuts - yet there is no respite.

Only some political ministers are good, take the case of Mr. Devendra Fadnavis. He is a little know MLA from Nagpur, but I like him! He takes up the necessary steps and agitations that we expect out of a man like him! WE NEED PEOPLE LIKE HIM!

I sincerely hope that people like him would come to the foray Indian politics. That is needed. Our current lot are tried, tested and failed; we need a younger and vibrant lot, crying hoarse on global warming and sustainable development, than a silly old Ram Mandir in Ayodhya.

Tell them! That this is not the way! This is not the way! Make India a Democracy!

Henry's Handball

Well, there goes controversy again. Thierry Henry, arguably a legend of our times, handles the ball like the prince of Football once did, back in the magical days off 1986. But he question comes, whether he was a villain or a victim?

Whether or not history and millions of passionate fans would ever forget Mr. Henry for his , eh.. mishandling of the situation.

Diego Armando Maradona, as believed by many to be the best player ever to have touched the ball, shunted his slam dunk past Peter Shilton in the 1986 Quarter Final against England. It is perhaps one of the most famous (or infamous) moment in the History of football. But his goal stood the tests of time, or perhaps for the reason that the next goal Maradona scored was to be called the " Leg Of God "

Maradona go the ball from Enrique, then cuts open the England defence and feints the Keeper to the back of the net... oh yeah, the best solo ever.

Perhaps God played twice that game on Maradona's side.

But this case is entirely different from the ferocious Maradona pouncing on the ball with his bare hands; Thierry Henry didn't cheat so blatantly!

If people would look at the replay, all in real time, there was hardly any time lag between his hand and his cross. Perhaps he was expecting the whistle to blow; he was waiting the whistle to go, as people score from offside and then the whistle goes.

If it doesn't, you don't nudge on the "advantage" the referee gave.

But, as genuine sportsman, I would have like it better from the french to have told the referee immediately, but then again: would you have done the same?

It is easy for us to say it with confidence, that yes, of course, we are saints come back, and we won't accept a trice of cheat-dirt. But, consider this situation: you are carrying the burden and expectation of more than 10 million fans, wearing the honours of a proud Footballing country, and you have the reputation of your carreer; would you still have done it?

Would you still have asked for a rematch?

I agree with Henry, he didn't mean it: it all happened in the heat of the game, where our rationale is very ill balanced.

But now, when all things have been said and done, I think FIFA should have a replay of the match. It is essential for a healthy relation between two countries, and for the broken and hurt pride of sporting men; it is good for the benefit of football.

Let this shameful incident be dusted but not forgotten!