Wish Everyone A Happy New Year 2011.

The Year 2010

As I am writing one of my last blogs of the year, I feel sad bidding 2010 goodbye, as I believe this year will prove to be the turning point of my life for reasons more than one. And this is a very strong feeling and I have many reasons to say that. But ahan........ won't write about the reasons now. You may think I am superstitious but I believe, I better not count the chickens before they hatch!!!!!.

But having said that, I promise whenever they hatch!!!.... I will write about the reasons and make a reference to this article:)...

2010 began with lot of hopes for me. One of the critical decisions of my life was at stake. And it gave me a reason to smile at the end as i finally succeeded in getting into core software development. Professionally it brought an exponential growth to my knowledge.

Personally I  have been through many ups and downs, many breakups(with friends) and makeups. This year I celebrated one of the loneliest birthdays of my life. But I don't blame anybody as I have now learnt how to ride on both tides and ebbs of the ocean of life with equal ease(I earnestly hope I have learnt :(... ). Wouldn't like to elaborate much on that.

 BUt here is what I expect from 2011....

1. A secret santa who will return the most precious gift of my life( I will explain this when this desire is fulfilled :) ..

2.     My desire of contributing to a child's education and bonding with that child beautifully for life. No I have no intentions      of adoptions. I aint as strong as likes of Sushmita Sen though i truly and hopelessly admire her strength. But all i want is  to make a contribution in helping a child's dream of education come true.

3. To continue blogging and achieve new levels of intimacy with my own self through it.

4. To make a difference in everyone's lives whom i touch.

5. Last but not the least - TO BE LOVED...:)


Hope I aint asking for too much from 2011...:)

How I Wish...

How I wish I was a butterfly, tiny yet beautiful, hovering around the flowers, enjoying the beauty abound...

How I wish I was  sunshine, spreading light all over, neither scared of the heights nor of the depths, travelling at an unstoppable speed...

How I wish I was a love letter reminding someone of the love spilling all over, bringing an ever lasting smile to that someone's face...

How I wish I was the sky reminding everyone that dare not mess with me, inspiring each one to accept the challenge to reach me and surpass me...

How I wish I was the heart, thudding with passion inside  my beloved, supplying the blood of love to each and every vein and nerve...

Why do we feel jealous?

Are we programmed to feel jealous when  something we consider to be our possession goes on to become someone else's possession? I think, yes that is one of the basic human natures and we cannot erase it ever from our psyche. But having said that, each and every individual has a different degree of jealousy, and its never the same.

And also, we can be jealous about both inanimate and animate things alike. A child may be extremely jealous when his favorite  toy  is being given to his best friend, and may react by crying out aloud until his toy his returned to him.
As an adult we could be extremely jealous when someone whom we love starts showing interest in anybody apart from our own selves..

But why...??

It is because somewhere inside, we have given that thing, inanimate or animate, an important place in our lives and cannot  think of parting with it, because we know  it will pain to give away a part of our selves.

But jealousy is not always justified. At times, it could be just an over exaggeration of expression. And this form of jealousy is the outcome of deep insecurities. Insecurity here is the feeling that the thing or person whom we love could be snatched from us anytime.

I too suffer from this feeling many times. And I am still learning to deal with it......

Mr And Miss Anita Sarkar

There she lied in a pool of blood in an unconscious state... with no one around to attend to her, with no one around to care for her.... and why should anyone care..?? For she had given birth to another girl to add to a brood of 5 girls and 2 boys.... Slowly she gained consciousness, cleaned the baby... and realized there was something scaringly weird about the baby... she received a sudden bolt from the blue when the reality that her baby was born neither a male nor a female dawned upon her.


Her heart would never accept that her child would grow up into what society terms as an eunuch. And she cried as everyone else showed false sympathy.


But this story is not about her, but her baby whom she lovingly named Anita. Anita was a  playful and chubby child having equal number of friends from both the sexes, and would find it extremely difficult to understand why people treat her so differently... her mother would weep silently away from her child, hating herself all the more for giving her child such a world which gave nothing more than hatred, insult and contempt..


One day, a gang of eunuchs came to their village for begging... and they insisted that anita be given to them, as she belonged to their community. And the villagers too forced the family to oblige with the gang.


And the unthinkable happened......... Anita had to go with their gang.


Slowly days passed by, and anita's parents left no stone unturned to search  for  their  child and were  finally successful in doing so with the help of some local goons.


They brought their child home, made her finish schooling with great difficulty.


And today she teaches kindergarten kids in a local school and is lovingly known as Anita Miss. She still is reluctant to live without the  fear of being abducted by the gang again, is very conscious about the beard that keeps growing on her face denying every faint feminine feeling to her, and equally conscious of her female features that make her continuously  face the cruel reality that she hangs somewhere in between, that she is neither a man nor a woman.


But she at least lives with the satisfaction that she is not a burden on her parents, and is proud to have got such loving parents.




Guys, I may be horrible at story telling.. but is our society fair and just to everyone...?? we may hear a resounding yes from the urban population.... but the fact is we need to do something concrete and meaningful for this section of society for they too are born with every human feeling.

Unfulfilled Promise...

As a child, along with my parents I used to frequently visit my mother's native place, which is a small village in the state of Orissa, India. And here I must say, those were the best memories of my childhood. But this blog is to pay remembrance to a person, to whom I still owe a promise and could never fulfill it.

Here goes the story of an old woman whom I fondly remember as mahanta maa. she was a tall stout lady defying her age completely, and used to live in the house that was diagonally opposite to my grandparents house. And none of our annual meetings was devoid of those beautiful and earthy evenings where I used to go to mahanta maa's muddy but clean house, sit on the  verandah of her house and listen to some beautifully narrated stories by her.

Some time those stories were her own.  Being married at an early age of 15, having lost her husband  a  year after , and then being a single parent to her only son, she proved that she doesn't need to be born in the 21st century to be a strong and independent woman.

As the years passed by, our friendship deepened and she made a permanent place in my naive heart.

And on one such visit, while we were leaving for delhi after spending some wonderful days in that place, I visited mahanta maa, which I would later realize was the last visit I would ever pay  her. And she took a promise, a promise that I would regularly write letters to her and gave me the address to which I should write to.

After coming back to delhi, I attempted to write a letter many times but could never post it due to some reason or the other. And on one eventful day, we got a news that she is no more and that she succumbed to old age. I was so deeply pained that I never wrote a letter after that in my life....

And the guilt of an unfulfilled promise hasn't left me even after so many  years and probably I will have to live with it for the rest of my life....
   

Today....

I feel empty  while I write this ....... I feel vague ..  But will still try my best to give my feelings , the wings of words... and let them fly to another sky where they can be seen and heard, where they can be cared for like a dove by tender hands and held close to a heart like a long lost beloved ...

There is no pain, there is no joy, there are no sorrows and no signs of happiness in the horizon yet.... I don't know what I truly want... All I feel is lost somewhere , not knowing where to go or what to do.....

But I will still wait for uuu.........................

What is Antimatter and how do we know it exists?

My Take On It - Well it has been said by not one, but most of the spiritual camps of the world that spirits and almost everything beyond our senses is made of antimatter, something that is complementary to matter but has contradictory properties. And, that is what makes this whole affair completely fascinating to me!!! In this Article, I have used an amalgam of research articles on antimatter, so go ahead and have a read yourself...!!!

INTRODUCTION

Antimatter is simply a substance that has some opposite qualities of regular matter.

To explain this more fully, atoms make up everything we see. Just as water is made of hydrogen and oxygen atoms, so it is with every other substance. The atoms, in turn, are made up of electrons, protons, and neutrons. Electrons each have a single negative charge, protons have a single positive charge, and neutrons have no charge at all.

The first antimatter particle discovered was the positron, or anti-electron. It has exactly the same mass as an electron, but it has a single positive charge. Using particle accelerators that slam particles together at near light speeds scientists produced the first observed anti-proton, though it lasted far less than a second. It had the same mass as a proton, but had a single negative charge.

Anti-neutrons have also been observed, but since they have no charge, it isn't the difference in charge that distinguishes the particle. Instead, it is the spin that makes it an anti-neutron. All neutrons possess a certain spin. Anti-neutrons, while having the same mass, have an opposite spin.

An interesting aspect of antimatter is that in contact with identical matter, there is a total inhalation of both. In essence, they cancel each other out. So an electron making contact with a positron will destroy both the electron and the positron, releasing a great deal of energy. To understand how this is possible, we need to look at Einstein's law of relativity.

Before doing that, we should look at Isaac Newton's law of Conservation of Energy. This states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, it can only be altered.

Einstein's law went a step further, and tells us that matter and energy are the same, they are just different sides of the same coin. By this law, energy is equal to mass times the speed of light, squared. That number is enormous, and it is the basis of atomic power, as we know it today. The thing is that atomic power is less than 20% efficient, meaning that most of the power created can't be used. For comparison, though, a light bulb is less than 1% efficient, most of the excess being converted to heat. (The same is true in a nuclear reactor.)

However, since matter and antimatter totally destroy one another on contact, there is 100% efficiency. Put in another way, if we could figure out how to combine 1 gram of water and 1 gram of anti-water, and harness all the resultant energy, we could produce enough energy in that one exchange to power the electrical needs of this planet for the next thousand years!

Science is working feverishly to try to figure out a way to do this. The obstacles are many and great, such as how to create the anti-water to begin with, and how to contain it without causing a detonation prematurely. Still, the rewards are clearly worth the effort.

In any event, antimatter is a fascinating substance that is nowhere near being fiction. We know it exists, and probably in great quantities naturally. The question is; so now what?


NASA: New and Improved Antimatter Spaceship for Mars Missions

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=19597 

Most self-respecting starships in science fiction stories use antimatter as fuel for a good reason - it's the most potent fuel known. While tons of chemical
fuel are needed to propel a human mission to Mars, just tens of milligrams of antimatter will do (a milligram is about one-thousandth the weight of a piece of the original M&M candy).

However, in reality this power comes with a price. Some antimatter reactions produce blasts of high energy gamma rays. Gamma rays are like X-rays on steroids. They penetrate matter and break apart molecules in cells, so they are not healthy to be around. High-energy gamma rays can also make the engines radioactive by fragmenting atoms of the engine material.

The NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) is funding a team of researchers working on a new design for an antimatter-powered spaceship that avoids this nasty side effect by producing gamma rays with much lower energy.






Antimatter is sometimes called the mirror image of normal matter because while it looks just like ordinary matter, some properties are reversed. For example, normal electrons, the familiar particles that carry electric current in everything from cell phones to plasma TVs, have a negative electric charge. Anti-electrons have a positive charge, so scientists dubbed them "positrons".
When antimatter meets matter, both annihilate in a flash of energy. This complete conversion to energy is what makes antimatter so powerful. Even the nuclear reactions that power atomic bombs come in a distant second, with only about three percent of their mass converted to energy.

NEED MORE INFORMATION? 

 Consider reading these articles:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-20023258-76.html 

http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,6299767,00.html

http://www.cavalierdaily.com/2010/12/01/scientists-devise-magnetic-field-to-advance-studies-of-antimatter/

http://hken.ibtimes.com/articles/85083/20101124/antimatter-trap-cern.htm

Those mischievious eyes...

Ah, those amazingly beautiful brown eyes... i can never forget them in a million years. Those almond shaped mysterious eyes had left me brimming with awe!!!

My memory of this encounter goes back to the time when I was in 5th standard and never had I anticipated, that it would feature on my blog after so many years.

It was a normal day, and like a normal kid, I packed my bag , finished my homework and got ready for school.It was half day at school, so was very happy to return home early after a playful day with friends.

As far as my memory goes, it never used to be a straight to home affair for me after school.On my way back, there always used to be another play session  with butterflies, dragonflies and the like. And my mother too never had to worry as the school was at a stone's throw away.

That particular day, after my usual play session, when I was returning back home, I noticed a big brown dog lying peacefully , at the basement of our two storeyed building, with its eyes dull and squinted hinting at a possible fight with his sweetheart. My innocent heart went out to him at once.

I knelt down, stretched my hand forward to touch his head. But couldn't, as I felt scared seeing his long brown fur. All of a sudden, he raised his head and looked straight into my eyes. I could clearly see my reflection in his eyes. And before I could tell him that I felt for him, he possibly thought that I was invading his privacy.....:(

And that was it... he started chasing me at a lightning speed, and my tiny feet could never maintain  the required speed. There was a point when he almost clutched my little skirt in his jaws, but fortunately for me my house was at the first floor, and hearing my cries all the people in the neighboring buildings had come out, and one of them shooed the dog monster away!!!

But I could never forget those big brown eyes.....!!!!!!

Can Anyone Explain?

At times , Its unimaginably difficult for me to come to terms with the ugly and cruel side of  nature. The same nature, that most of the times nurtures and protects us like a mother becomes a source of such unexplainable pain and heartache.


This Friday morning, all set to go to office with a hope of starting a wonderful day.. I open the door to step out of my house... and what I see, I can possibly never forget for days or probably years to come. I see the headless body of a mouse, possibly devoured by the cat whom I have most affectionately fed many times before, as I believe she is an estranged pet, yearning for love.


I don't say that my affection towards the cat has changed or will change in future, because I know she is programmed for that behavior. But my angst is directed towards nature which allows such violence.


Oh, I very well know the functioning of food chains and how important it is for the ecosystem, but at the same time find it very ironical and cannot comprehend the necessity of violence. Couldn't it be better if nature provided abundant food for each species, so that all could  live peacefully and happily without having to kill  other living beings?


Is life ultimately designed to fall prey to violence?

Am I mistaken in thinking  that nature could have had better ways to maintain the ecosystem..?


Can anyone explain....???

There is a man behind every woman... or should it be the other way around?

Oh.. the gender clash, what a cliched and monotonous topic. But at the same time, it wouldn't be wrong to say that it never really leaves our lives! or rather we are not willing to leave it behind!!!


If I try to understand god's master plan behind the idea of creating a man and a woman, or in better words a male and a female entity..... is it just to facilitate procreation?? Well, he could still have achieved the same by creating only male entities or the female ones, and giving them similar powers.


Probably, the next time I meet god, I can just drop my suggestion in his suggestion box...!!!


Why...?? Well.. Because I think it can make our lives much simpler. What with the power to understand each and every human specimen on earth!
(Here I Obviously mean that we don't understand men and men don't understand us)


Still, the beauty of our creator's creation cannot be ignored. Despite lamenting everything about the gender differences, isn't it beautiful to be brought into the world by our father, doesn't it feel cute to be around a brother, so nice being cared for by a friend, and so amazingly special being loved by our lover.??


So, should I say there is a man behind every woman...???


Maybe. Infact Yes. But we also cant ignore the fact that men and women alike, identify more easily with the feminine side of  nature more than anything else.
Proof...?? The proof lies in the very fact that cultures across the world are abound with words like mother nature, mother earth.. and the list goes on....


Final Conclusion - Women are the ultimate winners....!!!


Relax guys... The fact is we can never question god's masterplan with our limited understanding of his scheme of things.


So this is what I have to finally say... THERE IS A MAN BEHIND EVERY WOMAN AND VICE VERSA...!!!!!!

My First Blog

A warm Hello everyone...! Here I am .. all set to write my first blog. While I start writing, I realize a colleague who is also a sweet friend, trying to sneak in and catch the first few lines of what I would say, my blog debut.And alas she wins! and I lose in guarding the mystery surrounding my own flow of thoughts.


Now, coming back to writing what I actually want to write, well, does anyone out there believe in the concept of a strong spiritual connection between us and the people whom we love, a connection that transcends all the physical and material boundaries, a connection that kind of warns us when our people are in trouble and also conveys the message that they are happy by making us experience a sweet emotion, which is strange and unique.


Well, I have experienced that quite a number of times. And I strongly believe that there are somethings that can be understood only by our hearts and not our minds. There are somethings that can never be understood by plain logic.


And if the cosmos has destined some day in far future which can explain the logic behind this, I wish I am still alive to see that day...!!!

Greeting

Hi all....:)