And Miles to go before i Sleep :
Of late, i have been pondering over the course of my life. On a personal front iam quite near to achieving whatever i had been dreaming of during my boyhood days. This leaves me in a peculiar stage in my life where my mind grapples with an unprecedented aimlessness which led me to do an introspection and ponder over what all i should do before it is time to bid farewell to this life. To be honest i never had real "Long" Term objectives in my life. I mean "Objectives" which are different from dreams and are accompanied by a desperate craving for them. The short term objective that i had in my mind is "almost" accomplished. God willing, things should all be hunky- dory in another year. What do i do then ? As a result of my ruminations during the silent long walks that i have been taking during the last couple of days, I have been able to enumerate several things that i need to accomplish in my personal and profesional life before i die. With due respect to life and acknowledging the fact that the almighty might call me back any moment, let me list a few things that i would like to achieve in the years ahead,(by the way, the terms God and Almighty that i have used here have nothing to do with any religion or school of thought. My beliefs are complex, unorthodox, private and are not confined to the boundaries set by both religion and rationality.)

So here i go,

Sailing : To some of the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans.
Cross desert Safari : Cross the Thar desert on a camel.
Play Squash
Learn Judo (I have learned elementary Karate)
Visit Tibet and spend a couple of days in a buddhist monastery
Trek in the Himalayas
Visit Kashmir/Ladakh
Experience Weightlessness.
Study at one of the best Business Schools in the World
Teach mathematics in Elementary school, High School and College
Get a Phd in Mathematics
Write a book on Mathematics.
Learn to play a musical instrument
Learn to Speak, read and Write in a foreign language (other than English)
Take a Rollercoaster ride. (Done : Six Flags, New York)
See a volcano
Possess a Chenda and Idakka.
Ride a horse.
See penguins in the wild.
Watch Whales.
Parasail
Travel in a helicopter
Go to Historicon (Done : July 2007)
Play a wargame with complete model set. (Done : SWA and Historicon 2007)
Visit the Taj mahal
Visit the Great wall of China.
Visit the Grand Canyon.
Visit Rome
Visit Wayanad (My wife loves Wayanad :-) )
Row along the backwaters of kerala on a small wooden boat.
Visit Sikkim and Meghalaya.
Visit Coorg.
Trace my roots as back in time as possible.
Visit the cellular jail in Andamans.
Be extremely well read in history.
Run a marathon for a cause.
Possess an SLR camera.
Possess a high definition Camcorder (Done...Bought Sony SR-11..60 GB hard drive, Hi- Def)
Possess a "VERY BIG" LCD HDTV and home theatre system ;-)
Have a short stint as a National Geographic Reporter.
Have a rich personal library. (In Progress..Right now I have 100 odd books and around 25 DVDs)
Go on white water rafting and ocean kayaking.
Go on a tour to Australia and New Zealand.
Shave my head once.
Visit Jallianwalah Bagh, Fort Sumter and Gettysburg.
Write a travelogue.
Sponsor an underprivileged kid all the way from kindergarten through college.
Establish or Work for an orphanage.
Live in a very remote indian village for a week.
Visit New York on a new year's eve.
Be good at programming in some exotic language.
Possess a huge collection of Folk stories from all over the globe.
Have a beautiful garden (where I'll name the various trees)
Talk on radio (I have participated and won a prize in a quiz conducted and aired by All India Radio in 1995)
Address a gathering of over 1000 people. (I have addressed a gathering of around 100).
Learn to meditate deep.

Well, now this makes me feel that life ahead is all packed with fun and adventure and great things to do. From a state of aimlessness i have moved on and now i see a long road ahead with milestones by the sides, stretching as far as my eyes can see.

Ripley's haunted house : I still wonder how that guys floats there !

Pirates of the Caribbean :-). By the way, couple of months back i stumbled on this treasure trove of Pirate stories.

Do you know what this is? It is called "Sea Dragon". I was not aware that such a species existed. Among Sea Dragons, like Sea horses, it is the male that gives birth.

Thats a shark approaching me.I wonder what it would feel swimming above what would have been "fine delicacies" had the wall of glass given way. Nah, i don't think it would have even looked my way thanks to all the heavy weight men and women around me.

I sat for a long time, in front of this thick wall of glass that separated me from these colourful fishes at Ripley's Aquarium. There was a board which explained that millions of years ago, in the place of what we call Tennessee now, was a shallow ocean and how the smoky mountains came up when the African plate collided with the North American plate. I stayed there transfixed, wondering about life, evolution ..et al :-)

Pumpkins, Pumpkins everywhere....this is another place in Gatlinburg. I am seated in the middle. To my right is Saiju and left is Bijoy.

Harvest Festival : I had never heard about a Harvest festival in the U.S, till i saw these ubiquitous Pumpkins and Scarecrows in Gatlinburg. Trust me , those are not artificial vegetables. They are real and farm fresh. The whole town was strewn with pumpkins.

Gatlinburg, Tennessee is a wonderful place. I remember Ruskin Bond saying that mountains have a magical effect on humans. Standing on one of the rocks in this mountain stream and listening earnestly to its sounds, i felt my spirits lifted, a cloud of calm settled on my otherwise turbulent mind. True, mountains have an inimitable charm, an overpowering presence that can blow away all perturbations of the mind and humble any inflated ego.

A Childhood saved is more than a life saved.
I watched "Born into Brothels" today. The documentary directed by Zana Briski and Ross Kauffman chronicles their time in Sonagchi, Calcutta and the relationships they developed with children of prostitutes who work the city's notorious red light district. Brilliantly filmed, the movie leaves one with a heavy heart. The innocence and the smiles of the kids who grow up in those squalid environments belie their knowledge that their lives would in all likelihood be a repetition of the lives of their parents. Yet they appear happy and curious as everyother normal kid. It leaves me with anguish over the enormous loss of human potential due to economic and social injustice. How can we let a community like Sonagchi exist and still put forward claims to be a developing nation?
The directors could have made this a sad and detailed documentary about this red light slum, but instead they chose to recogonize its nature but focus on the innocence of the children and hope that could be offered to them. An Excellent film. Do watch it if ever possible, Think over it and Act. People get cowed when they think of the numbers and the magnitude of the task. Forget the numbers...Save just one life. Each of us saving one life, just one each...may be this world would turn out to be a better place to live.
Just one life each....Just one !

Six degrees of Separation :
SIX--> The Greeks were mad about this number. It has a special significance in Jewish mysticism because that is how long it took God to create the Universe. Looking around us we see more interesting things. The honey comb is made of small hexagonal structures. A grain of salt is cubic and has six sides and so does the six sided snow flake. Take a dollar or a carrom coin and it can be seen that we can place only six similar coins around it in a plane such that they all have contact with it.
In Number theory, number 6 has the significance of being the smallest perfect number. A number is perfect if it can be expressed as the sum of its factors.
Example : 6 = 1+2+3
28 = 1+2+4+7+14
Perfect numbers are very rare and there are only four of them between 1 and 10,000. They are 6, 28,496 and 8128.
I came across an interesting theory on BBC internet news today. It said that every person on this planet is related to everyone else by just six social acquaintances. Be it the president of America and a boatman on the ganges . If A is related to B by six social acquaintances, it means that A knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows B. Interesting, eh ?
The theory of six degrees of separation stems from the "Small World Theory" and there has been a lot of mathematical reasearch going on in this field. There are also experimental proofs to corroborate the theory of six degrees.
Scientists suggest that the six degrees theory might hold the key to understanding the way signals are transmitted through our nervous system. They are also exploring the theory to find more efficient ways to route airlines, lay power lines and also hyperlink the pages on the web.
Unbelievable, isn't it ? :-)

It was quite recently that i read the book "His Excellency : George Washington" by Joseph.J.Ellis. A few months back, i had visited the Civil War Museum in Atlanta, Georgia. The biography of George Washington prompted me to read further about American History, especially the Revolution and the Civil War and i started off here. Fort Sumter is one place i want to visit after Jallianwalah Bagh, back home. The huge walls at these places have been mute spectators to man's gory deeds. The otherwise young and bubbly history, that rambles on and on about a million men and their tales of success, failures,dreams, miseries,smiles, tears,nobility and decrepitude appears to be a doddering elderly matriarch, whose eyes have been wetted a million times, wailing over the bodies of her fallen sons. Man wins wars, establishes empires, rules them for centuries before being wiped off / replaced to keep the show going. The froth changes forms, coalesces, separates,bursts, comes again, all just to dissappear in the end. She has seen it all. Enough blood has been spilt on the earth, to turn all the oceans red. I was listening to Bob Dylan yesterday and it touched a chord, when he sang,

Yes, ’n’ how many ears must one man have
Before he can hear people cry?
Yes, ’n’ how many deaths will it take
Till he knows that too many people have died?
The answer, my friend, is blowin’ in the wind,
The answer is blowin’ in the wind.

In Memory of George Padamadan :
Life is strange in its ways...listen to this,
It was in Oct-Nov 2002 that i first heard of George Padamadan. In the backdrop of a discussion on some mathematical topic, one of my friends mentioned to me that he knew a man - a rustic living away from the dust, smoke, noise and rush of Cochin. The man was George Padamadan - A philosopher and a mathematician. My friend had been to his residence for some lessons and was fortunate to learn from the master hismself. I remember him recounting how George Sir, as they call him, explained problems and solutions with passion and how the beauty of the subject mesmerized him. I remember having searched for him on the internet and reading an article about him, that appeared in a newspaper.
After my last post about PHI, i went ahead to read some stuff on abstract algebra and strangely happened to remember George Padamadan. I quickly searched for him on Google. I was petrified for a moment when i read the first line "George Padamadan (1932 - 2004) was an Indian Mathematician." He passed away last year.
Given below is an excerpt from Wikipedia,
George Padamadan lived in a village called Thuruthur, Puthenvelikara in the Ernakulam district of Kerala in India. He was educated at St.Joseph's College, Thiruchirappally, Tamilnadu, India and later studied at Loyola College, Madras, India. He devoted his entire life to mathematical study and analysis. He remained unknown to the world of mathematics till the last stage of his life. The world community took notice of him in 1993, when his paper titled "An Amateur Look on the Fallibilist Epistemology of Mathematics", challenged the findings of world renowned Hungarian mathematician Lacoste's 'Proof and Analysis Theory'. Padamadan's logic kept mathematicians spellbound.
May his soul rest in peace.

Da Vinci, Langley and their codes :
I finished reading Dan Brown's Da Vinci Code last week. It was a indeed a good read. The plot was laid down beautifully and events flowed smoothly. Although it had hitherto unheard (or atleast "not so popular") anecdotes from the life of Jesus, what amused me more were the numerous references to ciphers and codes and the facts surrounding them.
There was a page or two devoted to explaining the significance of PHI or the "Divine Proportion". It is also called the Golden ratio, the Golden Mean or Golden section. It is equal to 1.618 ( or more accurately 1.6180339887498948482.......) . I tried to read more about this interesting number and here is what i have been able to compile from various sources,
1. The number PHI can be represented as a nested radical in the form sqrt(1+sqrt(1+sqrt(1+......)))
2. It can be represented as a continuous fraction in the form 1+ 1/ (1+ 1/ (1 + 1/(........))).
3. Trigonometric formulas for PHI include 2* cos ( Pi/5) , 1/2 sec ( (2*Pi)/5) , 1/2 cosec (Pi/10).
4.Given a rectangle having sides in the ratio 1:PHI, partitioning the original rectangle into a square and new rectangle results in the new rectangle having sides with the ratio 1:PHI ( Iam still playing with this, although it is clear that if the length : breadth ratio is set to (sqrt(5)+1)/2, the rectangle would be Golden.
5.Successive points dividing a golden rectangle into squares lie on a logarithmic spiral.
6.The quotients of the adjacent terms in a Fibonacci series approach PHI.
7. If a series of embedded pentagrams ( the five point star) is constructed to form a larger Pentagram and if the central Pentagram has centre at (0,0) and circum radius 1, then the subsequent pentagrams will have radii r(n) = 1/ PHI ^n.
The picture at the top illustrates the construction of the larger pentagram.
8. For a decagon ( 10 sided polygon ) the circumradius R= PHI * (length of the side of the decagon.)
9.A golden triangle is an isosceles triangle whose ratio of the hypotenuse to base is equal to PHI. In this case the vertex angle of the triangle would be 36 degrees.
10. 1/ PHI is equal to 1 - PHI.
11. From a golden triangle can be constructed a golden gnomon which is an obtuse isosceles triangle whose side to base ratio is 1/PHI.
12.Golden triangles and gnomons can be dissected into smaller triangles that are golden gnomons and golden triangles.
13. A Golden angle is the angle that divides a Full angle in the golden ratio. Considering the full angle 360 degrees, the golden angle is 360/(1+ PHI) which is equal to 137.5 degrees. Points separated by 137.5 degrees on a tightly bound spiral tend to form interlocking spirals winding in opposite directions and the number of spirals in these two families tend to be consecutive fibonacci numbers.
14. The arrangement of leaves in some plants ( called PHYLLOTAXIS) obey a number of subtle mathematical relationships. The florets in the head of a sunflower form two oppositely directed spirals, 55 of them clockwise and 34 counter clockwise (these are adjacent Fibonacci numbers :-)) ).
15.A similar phenomenon occurs for daisies, pineapples, pinecones, cauliflowers..etc.

This ubiquity of the divine proportion in nature points to an underlying sense of order in the chaos that surround us. What does this convey about the creator's intention? Well, it is for everyone to ponder!
And now about the folks at Langley.....what do you have to say about Kryptos ?

Atop the Chimney rock. With the Sun beaming right into my eyes i couldn't come up with anything that is anywhere in the vicinity of a smile. So this is how i ended up stretching my lips. The snaking river far below, the distant hills, the thick woods, the gushing wind, the floating clouds and above all the desperation of the mind and the soul to mop every bit of this sumptuous visual feast, threw me into a trance.

This is me :-)

The Price to pay for honesty :
We were caught for speeding on the freeway yesterday. For my friend who was driving, it was a real shock as it was his first speeding ticket in his 3 years stay in the USA. Although the vehicles that were with us on the road at that time were cruising at almost the same speed, the fact that the interceptor's eyes landed on us alone can only be construed as sheer ill luck. We were moving at 85 miles on a route where the speed limit was 70 miles. Anyway, let that not draw me into a discussion and make me digress from what i wanted to point out.
When my friend pointed out that he had never received a ticket previously and that the act was not deliberate, he would have hoped to be let off the hook with a warning. But the officer preferred to give him a ticket and asked him to report to the court on a specified date. Although my friend had to come up with a vacuous smile while trying to justify his act, the officer was as serious as he would have wanted to be and gave the best possible justification in such circumstances saying that he was only doing his job that he was paid for. "Perfect" !
Can you ever retort if that is what you hear unless you decide to deliberatley display an intention to bribe him? I had come across a similar experience at the mumbai airport,while returning to India. Although the Customs officer was certainly doing the job that he was paid for by asking me to open up my bags, he always kept my options open. After arguing for about 15 - 20 mins, i realised that it was for me to ask him whether he could, with the powers vested upon him save me from the trouble of opening all my suitcases. Though i had nothing more that a digital camera and a worn out speaker(which were evident in the X-Ray scans), the officer was hell bent on giving me that pain for which he alone had the medicine. And the medicine in this case was two $10 bills, which brought a smile to his face. On being led away by the officer's lieutenant ( or a man who thought so ) i was asked a very innocent question " Why did you waste so much time before doing this." I was floored by the sheer innocence of the question. It was as if he was asking me why i hadn't paid him the money i owed him. It was as if he was asking me his legitimate claim.
Why does this happen in dear old India? Why is it that i we had to pay the penalty here for speeding while all we would have lost for the same infringement in India is rupees fifty that the constable would have slided down his pocket with such deftness that would have put even P.C.Sorcar to shame. I wouldn't buy the argument that American Police do not contain venal elements within their ranks. Corruption is a universal phenomenon. Unscrupulous men and women are present everywhere irrespective of civilization or geographical location. But why is this phenomenon so pronounced in India?The answer, quite possibly lies in the discrepancy between his income and expenditure. The pittance that he is paid in India would have evaporated even the last shred of morality he held. Honesty to him would be a luxury that he cannot afford. It would demand too heavy a price.Domestic issues which are mostly due to poor living conditions would always weigh heavily on his mind and why should he not bypass it by making use of the power that he weilds as long as it doesn't pose life and death choices for any? The cursed customs officials in the Indian Airports, would perhaps attribute the reason behind their actions to the cost of living in those metros which their salaries can hardly match. There might not be anything intrinsically evil about these men who are often referred to in every article on corruption (incl this one), and who do nothing more than following the trend. Does that condone their act? Does poverty absolve a theif of his crime? These are topics that have been debated and written about ad nauseam. Answers to these questions are required at an individual level if one is to ever act against or condone an injustice done to him. I may perhaps be doing an introspection and mull over these things in the next few days as this topic returns to mind time and again. Lets talk about my ruminations in subsequent posts.

It is always the first drop that hangs the longest. The inevitable sense of insecurity that dominates the container, the mind, from revealing what it holds. Partly due to fear of derisive laughter, partly due to the silent whispers that constantly remind that what ever is to be said has already been said or is being said by another, partly due to the invisible reins, that disguised as modesty restrain, gag and arrest the thoughts.
Much to say, Much to Express.....will the words fail me? Or will i fail the words. I have seen enough of both. What are thoughts and what are words? Words are nothing but a medium to carry an idea or a thought from one mind to another. At the end of the transfer, the word would have formed the same idea or the thought on the mind of the listener or the reader. The extent to which the idea gets imprinted on the latter's mind is a measure of the potency of the words used. But is there not another factor in this equation? The writer or the speaker...who is the source of the words. The choice of the words would depend on his or her knowledge of the language and the extent to which the thought or the idea has been etched in his/her mind. Some sources are the medium. The words scream the originator's name when they hit the reader or the listener. Reading Basheer's works would give the same feeling where the words would stand up and say that they belong to him alone. Words love certain authors, certain speakers. The gifted are chased by the language. The mediocre chases the language leaving their thoughts stranded. The gifted and the gift merge into one as there is nothing like wet water. The mediocre stands away from his medium, wetting his/her hands only in ablution.
Let the drops fall. Let them flow. Come what may !