How lucky we are

We go about remarking that we are very lucky and thank God when we pass out of a difficult examination or when we find that we have scored very good marks. But there are very many far greater instances where we unfortunately fail to recognize how lucky we are. I present before you now, from a physicist’s point of view, two such instances, where I find that we are amusingly lucky, yet are unaware of it.

Mass of an electron:
When I said, ‘from a physicist’s point of view’ I meant it, and you should have expected nothing else. We all know at least something about the Big Bang theory of the Universe. So I shall not go deep into it. After the Big Bang, a second or so later, the Universe was just a flood of energy. As time passed, it turned into protons and electrons and all that. As we know, because of the opposite charge of the particles, they started attracting each other and formed atoms. Here is where the mass of the electron plays its role. Electrons have a rest mass of 9.109 x 10-31 kg. If the mass of the electron were to be a one-millionth of its present mass more, the proton would no longer be able to attract the electron. In that case, if still the Universe developed, you would see, a good Sanjeev (made only of protons) and a bad Sanjeev (made only electrons). Anyway, the fact is that if this were to be the case, the Universe would not have developed, and you and your neighbour and yes me too, would be hanging out naked out in the Open Space as group of positive and negative mass. Now, whatever we know about physics, we do not know why the electron has the mass that it has now. The only plausible explanation is, ‘God chose that exact mass, so that atoms would be formed, and eventually we too come into being.’ To put it in a nutshell, electrons have that exact mass so that humans could exist.

Gravitation:
The need for the Gravitational force can quite easily be explained without unnecessary exaggeration. By the way, the story that Newton was inspired by an apple falling on his head is apocryphal. It is contradictory to the fact that Newton was thinking about Gravity when an apple fell on his head. Anyway, without gravity, the Universe would still not have developed, and you and your neighbour and yes me too, would be hanging out naked out in the Open Space as bunch of identity-less atoms. No Sun to shine, no moon to enjoy and no cells to be, just a big big bunch of atoms.
Suppose there was no gravity, there would only be atoms, independent ones. The biggest thing in the whole wide Universe would be .., an atom!! Imagine a Universe like that. And the funniest part of it is that, we do not know why such a force as Gravity even exists. So once again, the only plausible explanation is, ’God decided that there be Gravity so that atoms would be formed and eventually we come into being.’ To put it in a nutshell once again, gravity exists only so that there can be humans.


I shall keep it simple now. I hope I have made my point clear. Next time you say the Morning Prayer, add these lines:
Thank you that the rest mass of an electron is 9.109x10-31 kg.
Thank you that the Universal Gravitational Constant is 6.6something. (Don’t be bothered)
Next time you look at the sky on a clear moonless sky, think to yourself, there are billions of stars out there and nearly nine billion planets. Yet we find no life form there. It is not used by any creature at all. So why does it all exist? Only for you to look and enjoy. So everything from the stars to the dust particles under your feet exists only for you. Make sure you do not utilise them improperly.

India needs a spiritual regeneration

Sri Sri Ravi Shankar (H H) had recently visited Chennai. Having taken The Art of Living classes in school, I decided to attend his classes (three evenings) which were going to be held in the University grounds in spite of End Semester exams.

For a man who could recite parts of the Bhagavad Gita at the age of four, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, was very different from what I had expected. He has the voice of a small child and yet, when one listened to him it was as though it was as if he was speaking to each one of us in particular. Being born in Tamil Nadu and brought up in Karnataka, he was familiar with Tamil. However his Tamil did prove to be quite a cause for smiles. He was in loss for a few words. Also there was this one time when he said “All of you shout like a lion. Ellarum puli (tiger) mathiri kathunga”.

Yet the image of the man with long hair and intermittently muttering “good good” into the mike is what I’ll never forget in my life. Those three days were really nice (apart from the fact that this was the only real life celebrity I had met after coming to Chennai). A few hundred people had come and the sports ground was filled with people for as far as the eye could see in the dark. This is not much, I hear, when compared to the last time he visited Chennai. Last time there had been no entry fee. The whole of Chennai had turned up to see the Guru who had brought along with him five terrorists. I don’t know what happened then, but I hear that they gave up their arms. Hey, this time he had brought along village women. Well, that was to demonstrate, how come village woman don’t grow obese unlike their counterparts in the cities. But let me move on to the more thought provoking things he said.

“ When the Art of Living volunteers were helping with the relief operations following the Gujarat earthquake, an old lady came up to one of the volunteers and unfolding a notch in her sari, gave him the only money left with her. Ten rupees. The volunteer politely rejected the money saying that he was not there for money, and that serving those in need itself contented him. The lady in turn replied, “The Earth has taken away all I have. Please don’t take away my Dharma as well.”

Tears well in my eyes as I write these lines. He continued:

“There are such people in the country. There always has been. Do any of you know of Lord McCauley’s address to the British parliament? Good. McCauley had visited India during the early 1800s and when he went back to his country he told the parliament that he had toured the entire country and had seen not one beggar. The people are brimming with spiritual energy. He told them that colonising the country would be impossible without breaking her backbone, her spiritual strength........ Before they came, Chennai had over a 1000 colleges of Medicine. The first thing they did when they came here was to shut down all of them.........”

I have at your service the excerpt from his speech which Guruji was referring to:

“I have travelled across the length and breadth of India and I have not seen one person who is a beggar, who is a thief. Such wealth I have seen in this country, such high moral values, people of such calibre, that I do not think we would ever conquer this country, unless we break the very backbone of this nation, which is her spiritual and cultural heritage, and, therefore, I propose that we replace her old and ancient education system, her culture, for if the Indians think that all that is foreign and English is good and greater than their own, they will lose their self-esteem, their native self-culture and they will become what we want them to be, a truly dominated nation“.-Lord McCauley in his speech of Feb 2, 1835, British Parliament.

And that is what the British have done. They have stripped us of our pride, our heritage, our ancient education system, and our culture. And we remain today, with our compasses steadily pointing west. In two hundred years, we have forgotten ourselves. Swami Vivekananda alerted us “O ye modern Hindus, de-hypnotize yourselves!”

What remains to be done now, Guruji hinted “India needs a spiritual regeneration. We need to remember our culture ”. Yes, I realise, we need to remember who we are. If the auto driver, who throws cigarette butts out of the window and onto the pavement where people are standing, is spiritually in touch with himself, or at least with the moral values our people adhered to two hundred years ago, would he do it? Would a person knowing the glory of this great nation dare to spit on the road? The knowledge of the life that our forefathers lived alone would make us think twice before urinating on the streets. And this will result in a nation infinitely more stronger and integrated than we already are.

Most text books note that of all the ancient civilizations, India’s culture is one that has not been broken through history. Today, on looking at the ancient way of life that is rarely followed nowadays I realise the blissful ignorance we all have been immersed in.

People People ought to know

People People ought to know

There are a few people in the world who lie between Gandhi or Einstein and the common man. Even though they are not as famous as the formers, I believe their names ought to be recognized even more than they are today. This is a small little venture of mine trying to chronicle the deeds and the biographies of such people. In many cases you might find that these people are already well known. In these cases I write on them because I'm so interested in them, nothing more. Here it goes, my first Publication on People People ought to know

Mark Shuttleworth

Every time I go for a jog I end up huffing and puffing and thinking “hell, if I was a bit fitter, this would be easier”. But the reality is that if I were fitter, I would just want to run further or faster, and end up huffing and puffing anyway. :-)

-Mark Shuttleworth

Those of you who are interested in Science and Astronomy would know him as the second space tourist in the history of Mankind.Others, interested in Technology and Linux, would associate him with Thwate and Cannonical Int.,.Humanists would simply know him as the philanthropist Mark Shuttleworth. Well, if you are none of the above, and don't know him at all, then its about time.
Mark Shuttleworth was born in a dusty gold mining town in South Africa. He grew up in South African capital of Cape Town and went to the University of Cape Town. His interest in Computers began the way in which most people's do. Through Games. While at the UCT, he was immensly attracted by the potential of the Internet. As soon as he left college,in 1995, he founded an internet consulting firm called Thawte.The focus of the company quickly shifted to Internet security for electronic commerce. Thawte became the first company to produce a full-security e-commerce web server.This brought Thawte to the notice of the world.Thawte was one of the first companies to be recognized by both Netscape and Microsoft as a trusted third party for web site certification. By 1999, Thawte was fastest-growing internet certificate authority, and was the leading certificate authority outside of the USA. Mark sold Thawte to VeriSign in December 1999. You can see the name of VeriSign quite often in case you use Opera. Anyways, after he sold for multi-billion dollars he is known to have given thousands of dollars to his employees. talk of generousity.

Here's quote I got up in his name and makes an interesting read:

Then, a very smart man called Mark Shuttleworth made 500 million dollars in the .com boom, learned Russian from scratch, went to space, came back in one piece, funded several charities focussing on South Africa, and... oh yes, he created Ubuntu Linux.

You can read it

here and see why this guy,Tony Mobili says so. He sums it up doesn't he? Shuttleworth millions of dollars. Because he believed in the potential of the South Africans in producing empowering ideas, he founded an organisation called HBD Venture Capital. Guess what HBD stands for. Here Be dragons. Legend has it that, in olden days, uncharted territories in maps were marked as Here be Dragons. Cool name for a corpporate company,aye! Then again, he started up numerous charities. In April 2002, he realised the dream of every young boy, to "fly" in space and to feel weightlessness. He spent seven months in Star city,Russia, learning Russian and undergoing intensive training.
When once you have tasted flight, you will forever walk the earth with your eyes turned skyward, for there you have been and there you will always long to return. Leonardo da Vinci
This is the tag you'll see on

I went home a few weeks back eagerly awaiting to meet my friends,parents,sister and of course my dear PC. Everybody knows all the horrific deeds I have done to my PC. All possible experimentations. This time it was Ubuntu.
Windows had been easy, I guess. All possible windows tweaks had been done and my PC was in the best of its health. Well, It wasn't to be for long. I had applied for CD of the latest version of the Linux OS, Ubuntu.Ubuntu is an african word meaning Humanity for others.
What do you know! They'll ship you a copy of the Disc right to your home for free!!!!!
You can expect the astonishment on my mom's face when I received an international courier all the way from the Netherlands. Well, that lasted for a few days. Then it was upto me to get Ubuntu up and running.
I have no previous experience Dual booting a PC. What the hell, I dared it. I didn't even bother to read the documentation or the manual. After all, I had Installed Windoze before, and Ubuntu's installation was supposed to be one of the simplest.
But the fact remains that I messed it up and ended up rendering the entire hard disk unusable. All my songs,my father's office work and my sister's files were gone. And Ubuntu wasn't even running. The only thing the PC showed after BIOS was
GRUB Loading Please wait...
Error 17
Thats it. Man, I was in for a jam. But, it seems were anticipating exactly such thing. There were no exchange of shouts, only a request to get it corrected by the time I was to leave. I promtly formatted the entire hard drive and re-installed Windows XP itself. Phew
Just in case you want to install Ubuntu and dual boot it with Windows read some of the nice links below. Otherwise you can also mail me or message me or whatever.

http://howtos.linux.com/howtos/

http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/index.php

http://www.crhc.uiuc.edu/~mjmille2/howtos/dual-boot-linux-and-indows/

http://users.bigpond.net.au/hermanzone/

Hey, I'm in the University and I've not yet installed Ubuntu in my PC yet. So Don't get overexcited and message me about how to install it.(I know you won't)