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This was initially started under a Banyan tree!
And now the decisions made in this place can change the fortune of not only a person but also a whole country!

With the recent screening of movies and series of Stocks and stock exchanges; the general public has started getting to know about stocks and how the market works!

Slowly the financial sections of the paper (for those few who still read em!); which used to be in the last section, has slowly started gaining prominence!

This is because what happens in the financial world and market actually makes the whole flow in all the pages! Each and every single story in every page can finally be linked to a financial decision in one way or the other!

All said and done, Money speaks! It is a very important factor in your freedom and life. Of course it is not the MOST important which is where people falter!

Each and every individual who is a human with a social life finally thrives to earn a financial freedom!

Then again the world of stocks is full of bear and bulls and mainly shocks!

The interesting thing though is the fact that the sixth largest stock exchange in the world which is the Bombay stock exchange was started under a Banyan tree!

Bombay Stock Exchange was started by Premchand Roychand in 1875. In the 1850s, five stock brokers gathered together under a Banyan tree in front of Mumbai Town Hall!
A decade later, the brokers moved their location to another leafy setting, this time under banyan trees!
Finally in 1874, the brokers found a permanent location, the one that they could call their own. The Bombay Stock Exchange continued to operate out of a building near the Town Hall until 1928. 

The street on which the present site is located came to be called Dalal Street in Hindi (meaning “Broker Street”) due to the location of the exchange! It is also one of the oldest exchanges in Asia!

Hope you have some stocks! and of course pay tax or Lagaan!

Which reminds me of the celebrity Ashutosh Gowariker! You expected that right!?

Now lemme watch some Swades and think about home!

Shubh ratri!

Do you know that Eskimos who are surrounded by snow have around fifty names for the types of snow!

In Nunavimmiutitut, the Inuktitut dialect spoken in Canada’s Nunavik region has at least 53, including matsaaruti, for wet snow that can be used to ice a sleigh’s runners, and pukak, for crystalline powder snow that looks like salt.

You can have crunchy snow or hard snow or soft snow! Just when you thought you just want snow! What’s the great deal you ask? Well, in spite of fifty names for different types of snow, the Eskimos do not have a single name for, you guessed it; snow! 

Yes! They have snow all over but do not have a name for snow! 

Which means there is a word for a falling snow or an already fallen snow! But no word which means just snow!

Then again another surprising fact is that the Scots have at least 400 words for snow!

Now don’t you feel lucky that all you need to know in English about snow is that it is called, well; SNOW!

It’s like you go to Starbucks or Coffee Day and there are tens of different types of coffee or drink! You have Mocha, latte or frappe! Then again you are stuck in the counter and all you actually wanted was maybe a simple filter coffee or even a Tea! But then you have to tell the person that you need a simple coffee! Nod for whipped cream or some other stuff he or she would tell and you would nod along as if you understood everything! Then when you get that huge cup of coffee after getting your name called out so loud, all you like to do it grab it and scoot!

Of course then you would drink a little and would just waste the rest! You may keep the cup with your name though!

Better to go with your daughter who would confidently go to the counter and say I want a Strawberry Vanilla Bean frappuccino with chocolate sprinles and whipped cream to go!

Now that’s snow off or rather show off! Of course when your work is as good as the work of Late Sushma Swaraj ji then thats itself can snow or show!

One of the most busiest days ever! 

A quick sketch and an even quicker blog!

Shubh ratri!

Limits to medicine:Medical nemesis is a hard hitting novel by Ivan illich tells how the present day doctors are simply the priests of yesteryears who simply comfort but actually make no difference to the disease! Case in point is how according to the author is how the fall of TB and whooping cough is mainly because of better housing and nutrition and not medication!

Of course it takes some neutrality to just read the novel as a doctor since it is obviously against them!

Then again if you do not have good critic then how would you improve!? Just be careful of those whose past time is criticism! Those who only complain and never praise do not deserve either your time or your effort and most importantly your respect!

In one of the chapters, Ivan mentions this interesting story! In fact there are so many references and this goes to show how much research has gone in the novel so let us give him due!

So the example given was of something called the Paradoxical disease control! This was in relation to the insecticide DDT as studied by Davies and W. F. Edmundson.

The author states how this is a good example of paradoxical disease control from Borneo: Insecticides used in villages to control malaria vectors also accumulated in cockroaches, most of which were resistant! Those roaches would see the end of the Universe and maybe even survive that! Anyway that was not the crux! The issue was that the lizards who fed on these ‘chemically infused’ roaches were not resistant to the effect of DDT!

So the Geckoes those fed on these, became lethargic, and fell prey to cats!
The cats thought it was a great slow food! But of course they also were very sensitive to the DDT!

The final effect was that the cats died, and then the rats had a free run!
The rats multiplied, and with rats came the threat of epidemic bubonic plague!

To cut a long story a little less long; the final solution was that the army had to parachute cats into the jungle village to get the rats! And of course the DDT was stopped! Nature is nothing but balance!

A perfect balance were also those ACK comics especially the ones of Ithihasa which were a treasure house of knowledge! Fun and informative! Especially the Magnum Opus Mahabharat and Ramayan!
The sketch of today is of this great celebrity who made many of those stories happen!

Kamala Chandrakant!
Thank you madam for the amazing work!
We will miss you! Heartfelt condolences
Om shanti

Shubh ratri…

The crux of this very useful invention was the fact that you have return customers and like the printer! Even the printer manufacturer knows that the real money is not in the sale of printer but the cartridges!

This is something which you use to cut your face every day!

Now do not get any violent thoughts! Its Shaving Blade!

The best blades we used to have were the ones from Dad’s shaving razor! The rectangle shaped blade was so thin and sharp and many times rusted!

The good quality ones used to be more clean for longer duration! Talent was to break them into two blades each!

It was a thrill to see your dad shave using those blades which looked so dangerous! Of course many of us used to use that blade to sharpen our pencils! Sharpener was only during the initial days when the school began! Even otherwise though, it was better to sharpen the pencil with a blade since the sharpener those days would always break the lead! If you do not insert the pencil properly or if the lead is broken in an angle then the lead would not get sharpened properly and the pencil would go on getting broken and short!

Of course by the time we grew up, those razors were long gone! Now was the time of the disposable razors! Even though those razors were supposed to be used only once, we used to use them lots of times cutting our face all over! The end of every shave used to look like a war zone!

Later on the double blades and then the triple ones were the routine!

My present blade called the fusion is five! Unfortunately once you are used to the higher number, it is difficult to go down! The best shave is always the one with the new blade! Every day after that cutting experience goes down!

Looking at the history it has been seen that circular razors made of solid gold or copper can be found in some Egyptian tombs from as far back as the 4th millennium BC, though many other tools were used by men to shave their faces!

Apparently there are drawings on cave walls that show prehistoric people using clamshells, flint knives, and even shark teeth to shave!

A circa 1762 invention by French cutler Jean-Jacques Perret added a protective guard to a regular straight razor! This was a major step in the shaving area!

Of course the proper safety razor came later!

The first known occurrence of the term “safety razor” is found in a patent from 1880 for a razor in the basic contemporary configuration with a handle in which a removable blade is placed. Of course when it comes to shaving, then there is only Gillette! At least for now!

As a young man, King C. Gillette (1855-1932) worked as a traveling salesman. Always interested in inventions, King received a number of patents, none more important than one for a disposable safety razor blade.

In developing the blade, King was inspired by one of his employers, William Painter, who made his fortune inventing the disposable bottle cap!

Painter advised Gillette to invent another disposable item that would create a steady stream of return customers!

In 1895, Gillette worked out the idea for a razor blade that could be fit into a holder and replaced when dulled, thereby insuring a sharp blade for every shave! After an extensive search, Gillette found William Emery Nickerson, an MIT trained engineer, to produce the thin, sharpened steel blades he envisioned.

Now of course you do have many imitations but as far as shaving is concerned, Gillette blades are one of the best!

Also one of the best Padma winner is Dr Subroto Das! His efforts for highway accident victim support is simply remarkable!
He developed Lifeline Foundation which is a highway rescue response model that was among those used in designing EMS services in India.

It was noted that the foundation worked on utilizing existing healthcare infrastructure and coordinating with emergency rescue departments.
In 2007, Gujarat became the first state in India to pass Emergency Medical Services legislation, with Lifeline Foundation participating in the process!

Now he is a clear winner! Do you know him or about him!?
Well, now you do!

Shubh ratri!

When it is said that true money is in knowledge, maybe they were referring to this game!

In that you must know the word OXYPHENBUTAZONE! This is the word which would theoretically fetch you the highest points!

Am sure the clever ones would have got the game which literally means Scratch frantically!

For the other majority like me; the game is SCRABBLE! Did you know that the points have been given after careful study and frequency analysis!?

Also by the way, the game not only had a predecessor, it was also a big flop (or at least not a major success!) when it was released! In fact it was not even called SCRABBLE!

So the story goes way back in 1931 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the American architect Alfred Mosher Butts created the game as a variation on an earlier word game he invented, called Lexiko!

The two games had the same set of letter tiles, whose distributions and point values Butts worked out by performing a frequency analysis of letters from various sources, including The New York Times!

The new game, which he called Criss-Crosswords, added the 15×15 gameboard and the crossword-style gameplay. He manufactured a few sets himself but was not successful in selling the game to any major game manufacturers of the day!

In 1948, James Brunot, a resident of Newtown, Connecticut, and one of the few owners of the original Criss-Crosswords game, bought the rights to manufacture the game in exchange for granting Butts a royalty on every unit sold!

Brunot also slightly rearranged the “premium” squares of the board and simplified the rules; he also renamed the game Scrabble, a real word that means “scratch frantically”!

Brunot and his family made sets in a converted former schoolhouse in Dodgingtown, Connecticut, a section of Newtown. They made 2,400 sets that year but lost money!


Finally when a big man, Jack Straus, the president of Macy’s, played the game on vacation, the big change happened!

Upon returning from vacation, he was surprised to find that his store did not carry the game. He placed a large order, and within a year, “everyone had to have one!

Of course it was later a major success so much that it was even turned into a TV show!

The highest theoretical highest-scoring Scrabble word out there is OXYPHENBUTAZONE. Ohioan Dan Stock found the word, which is worth a wild 1,458 points. And if a player was able to add some specific hooked words to the theoretical board, they could score up to 1,778 points!

As of 2008, the game is sold in 121 countries and is available in more than 30 languages; approximately 150 million sets have been sold worldwide, and roughly one-third of American homes and half of British homes have a Scrabble set!

One of the games which entertains and teaches at the same time! Teach and teacher reminds me of the inspiring tale of Padma award winner Meenakshi Amma Gurukkal who is an Indian martial artist known as a practitioner and teacher of Kalaripayattu!

Read about her to get inspired!

SHubh Ratri!

Getting a new knife for the kitchen is a great event most of the time because the new ones would be so sharp!

Of course more sharp also means that you can get cut more easily!

A clean new knife also makes a clean cut! That is the only solace since the cut normally happens when you are in a hurry and you have to cook a lot of food!

I have lost counts the amount of cuts I have had and continued with the little thing which kept the ‘area’ blood free!

Yes the band aid! Band aids are one of the best inventions ever! Wrap them up and you are good to go!

Of course when we were kids, even small cuts used to get wrapped in them and we used to get cuts just so that we could wear them!

The competition was to see who could wear them the longest! The clean brown dressing would become dirty and half open and slowly try to escape! But we held on! Later on removing them was a hassle if you had hair!

Did you know that this amazing invention was done by a dutiful husband who did not want to see his blood wife! I mean his wife with blood! I mean blood on his wife…You get the drill!

So in the early 1920s, there were no proper methods to bind up minor cuts.


Earle Dickson, was a Johnson & Johnson employee,  in Highland Park, New Jersey and when he saw his wife Josephine frequently cut and burned herself while cooking, he made a portable dressing with cotton and a adhesive!

The prototype allowed her to dress her wounds without assistance!

Dickson passed the idea on to his employer, which went on to produce and market the product as the Band-Aid.

Dickson had a successful career at Johnson & Johnson, rising to vice president before his retirement in 1957.

Initially, Band-Aids were sold as a single 18-inch long strip of tape that had to be cut into smaller pieces in order to be applied to wounds!
Later on these were cut down to the present size and now they even come as a spot! Later on they have also come as waterproof ones!

So the original Band-Aids were handmade and not very popular.

By 1924, Johnson & Johnson introduced machine-made Band-Aids and began the sale of sterilized Band-Aids in 1939!

In World War II, millions were shipped overseas, helping popularize the product. Since then, Johnson & Johnson has estimated a sale of over 100 billion Band-Aids worldwide!

In 2022, Band-Aid was named the most trusted brand in the United States, beating the second place brand, Lysol, by more than two points! So much so that just like Xerox which has replaced the actual word Photocopy; the little adhesive dressing is called Band-aid no matter the brand!

Talking about safety comes to mind the Padma award winner Bipin Ganatra! He is a fire fighter volunteer and his life will inspire you like fire!

Do read about him!

Shubh ratri!

The original name of this very popular game was changed only because it sounded very close to one of the most common swear word used in the ENGLISH language!

The short form is WTF! Though according to Sheldon it may be What the Fracas!

The Game is a pretty simple one in which you have a central character who looks like the first emoticon! And all it does is gobble up the dots on the screen while trying to escape from ghosts like characters!

Got the game? Well, it is PAC MAN!

By the way it was first called PUCK MAN! No need ask why they changed it to PAC right!?

The idea of Pac-Man was taken from both the image of a pizza with a slice removed and from rounding out the Japanese symbol (kuchi, lit. “mouth”).

The character was made to be cute and colorful to appeal to younger players!
The actual name was derived from the Japanese phrase ‘paku paku taberu’ which apparently means “to gobbling something up”!

The title was changed in international releases to avoid it sounding too similar to an expletive (the Japanese pronunciation of paku being similar to ‘pucku’) and due to fear of arcade cabinets being vandalised by altering the P in ‘Puck-Man’ to an F!

Pac-Man has the highest-brand awareness of any video game character in many countries, becoming an icon in video games and pop culture. He is credited as the first video game mascot character and the first to receive merchandise. He also appears as a playable guest character in some other games, most notably in the Super Smash Bros. series (specifically in the fourth and fifth installments) and in the Ridge Racer series!

In most of the earlier Game zones or malls or even game events; there was at least one Pac Man zone or game! The simplicity of the game along with the fast paced nature of the game made it instantly and constantly popular!

The player controls Pac-Man, who must eat all the dots inside an enclosed maze while avoiding four colored ghosts. Eating large flashing dots called “Power Pellets” causes the ghosts to temporarily turn blue, allowing Pac-Man to eat them for bonus points.

The character has been included on several lists for the greatest, most iconic, or most influential video game characters of all time.

And to think that it was almost called Puck; man!

Luckily it’s all not in only in the name! Of course by any other name the great Tribal artist Sri Pandi Ram Mandavi would still be great!

Another well deserved Padma

Do read about him

Shubh ratri…

Don’t let others rent space in your head by Gary Coxe

E Book

Like all self help books; this one is supposedly different! It is in many ways in fact!

Also, if it is a self help book then there is no doubt that the person who writes it has to have had a major tragedy and then recovered and is now successful at least while writing the book!

Those points are met since the author in fact faces a great challenge at the beginning of his life and then he not only recovers but also becomes really good!

There are so many contradicting things he says in the novel and most of the times it does make sense!

The best parts are the one liners including the title of the book and these are written separate with a summary at the end of each chapter and that it really great for a quick revision!

One of this is the adage that, Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so! This is really true most of the time!

Irrationally Optimistic or Being very confident is also not good! Apparently Positive thinking is like a spray paint on rust!

A goal is just a dream with a deadline is supposedly ridiculous!

First, positive thinking, even if it seems to work, doesn’t last long. Second, positive thinking is absolutely ineffective if you’re not at the right point in your life. Third, when it doesn’t work, people think they’re not doing it right, and they become more discouraged.
Fourth, positive thinking is often presented as the SOLUTION rather than a simple limited use tool!

The amazing story of the friend who bought a hotel, which was derelict and very close to the airport, but he turned it into a profitable venture. His name is Butch Steward! This was mentioned in the beginning and in the end and is an inspiring story!

Then he talks about insurance. People buy insurance because bad things happen. In most cases, insurance is the real-world manifestation of negative thoughts and a plan to prepare for less than perfect outcomes. It is actually a positive plan for negative possibilities.

In one chapter he states how Negative thinking can yield positive results. Planning for failure keeps us from being caught off guard. Too many sales professionals don’t acknowledge failure as a possible outcome, so when it happens, they are devastated. Avoiding negative thoughts can be deadly.

He also states how frustration equals success!! As you overcome challenges and reach higher and higher goals in your business, the number and type of frustrations that arise often grows!


Rewiring your brain- Going beyond positive thinking; the four step process; this is the core of the book in the self help section and it goes in steps. Though I did not do the steps, am sure if you do, it may help!

The first step in this is You must ask yourself ‘Why must I change this behaviour?’ and then write
The challenge or behaviour I want to change or overcome is:

He also states that often the more painful, the right to the Top, the more memorable and motivating it becomes!

Then he mentions an interesting story on how he was almost caught by the DEA on drug smuggling due to a series of confusions and stereotyping! A great story indeed!

He later tells how the nervous system or rather the brain cannot tell the difference between reality and imagination, so imagine more!

Our perception of problems, obstacles are challenges takes on a whole new meaning when we have a goal !

People who would suggest that one should sell his or her aeroplane and give the money to charity, have an incredibly shortsighted view apparently! This is one of the points like Ayn Ryan and was close to my thought process!

The author says that first of all if he didn’t love flying and wasn’t driven to acquire a plane or a helicopter, he wouldn’t have worked so hard, what’s more occasionally, he is able to fly to special needs children to various places for medical treatment at no cost. He could never do that if he had no plane or he had sufficient budget for Travel. He could continue to contribute charities and help deserving families only as long as he keeps his own financial resources in line.

Basically, only the rich can actually do charity, but by doing charity, you must not become poor!

This is so true according to me since I genuinely feel open charity is only to feed your own ego! Nothing is and must be free! Only then both the giver and the taker would understand its value!

All in all a very good novel to read indeed and a little different than the usual horde!

Just remember that, DO NOT let others rent space in your brain! For free! Meaning; Do not let stuff especially of those who cheated you or harmed you to be in your minds and spoil it! Easier said than done! But then nothing good comes easy!

right!?

Read this sentence and think!
‘A Santa dog lived as a devil god at NASA!’
No, I have not gone mad! (Not yet anyway!)

Or how about “sator arepo tenet opera rotas”!

Now now, it is not an ode to the movie Tenet! Or is it!?

Then how about Malayalam?

Well, what about it!?

They are all connected you see!

Forget words and sentences! Even our basic genetic structure is related to these words and sentences!

Before you get a syndrome! Let me ease your mind by telling you that these are Palindromes!

A palindrome is a word, number, phrase, or other sequence of characters which reads the same backward as forward, such as madam or racecar or the most famous one in this part; Malayalam!


Dating back to about 70 AD—the first palindromes were found as graffiti at Herculaneum and was written in Latin and dates back to Roman times. It read “sator arepo tenet opera rotas”, which could be translated two ways:
“The sower Arepo leads with his hand the plough”.
or
“The sower Arepo holds the wheels with effort”!

Other sentence “A man, a plan, a canal, Panama”, “Mr. Owl ate my metal worm”, “Do geese see God?”, or “Was it a car or a cat I saw?”.
Punctuation, capitalization, and spaces are usually ignored. Some, such as “Rats live on no evil star”, “Live on time, emit no evil”, and “Step on no pets”, include the spaces!

Apparently there’s even a new word, “emordnilap”, inspired by palindromes!

According to Guinness World Records, the Finnish 19-letter word saippuakivikauppias (a soapstone vendor), is the world’s longest palindromic word in everyday use!

The longest single-word palindrome in the Oxford English Dictionary is the 12-letter onomatopoeic word tattarrattat, coined by James Joyce in Ulysses (1922) for a knock on the door!

The 9-letter word Rotavator, a trademarked name for an agricultural machine, is listed in dictionaries as being the longest single-word palindrome.

The 9-letter term redivider is used by some writers, but appears to be an invented or derived term; only redivide and redivision appear in the Shorter

Of course our most famous and known Palindrome is the 9-letter word Malayalam!


Palindromic motifs are also found in most genomes or sets of genetic instructions. The meaning of palindrome in the context of genetics is slightly different, from the definition used for words and sentences. Since the DNA is formed by two paired strands of nucleotides, and the nucleotides always pair in the same way (Adenine (A) with Thymine (T), Cytosine (C) with Guanine (G)), a (single-stranded) sequence of DNA is said to be a palindrome if it is equal to its complementary sequence read backward. For example, the sequence ACCTAGGT is palindromic because its complement is TGGATCCA, which is equal to the original sequence in reverse complement!

So as you see is what you get! From back or front, it is the same! That’s Palindrome!

‘now u won!’

No! Not yet gone mad! That’s also a Palindrome!

Now try to make a big one and maybe win a Padma! For time being though it’s for those who do real ground work like Padma award winner Chaitram pawar!

‘Now sleep eels won!’

Yeah! That another one by me!

This may be one of the most costliest photographs ever! Second only to a very controversial photo apparently!

There would not be many who have not seen this photo!

Even if you were an Apple fan! Not the fruit by the way!

The picture is called BLISS!

It was originally titled Bucolic Green Hills!

Ok now have some patience while the system loads!

Yes! It is the default computer wallpaper of Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system and is a virtually unedited picture of a bright green hill and blue sky captured by Charles O’Rear in 1996.


Apparently microsoft not only paid a bomb for the snap but also there is a back story which involves insect infestation!

Napa Valley spent most of the 1990s trying desperately to curb the spread of phylloxera, a microscopic pest that was devastating its grapes. By the time the epidemic had run its course in 1999, some 50,000 acres of fields had been decimated!

Although the cost for growers was astronomical—half a billion dollars in total—the landscape of Northern California had never looked more idyllic. Endless rows of grapevines had been replaced by a lush carpet of grass, dotted here and there with wildflowers!

It was this vision of Sonoma County that flashed by Charles O’Rear’s car window as he drove down Highway 121 in 1998. Although he was a professional photographer, with work featured in National Geographic and the Los Angeles Times, O’Rear wasn’t on assignment that Friday afternoon.

But he still had one eye on the region’s rolling hills. It was January, and after the winter rains, “the grasses turn green and I know the chances of finding these beautiful hillsides are really good,” he recalled. “I’m going to be more prepared. I’m going to be more alert.”

And then, he saw it. “My God!” he thought. “The grass is perfect! It’s green! The sun is out, there’s some clouds.’”

So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm! Yes! Film and not digital! Irony!


Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system!

And by the way he had to personally hand deliver the photo since the cost of insurance (because of the high price of course!) was so high that FedEx refused to deliver such a huge responsibility!

Now no one knows how much Microsoft paid for the snap but it is the second largest sum received by a living photographer for a single photo!

I know! Even I would not get sleep if you do not know which is the first! That is apparently a photo of Bill Clinton hugging Monica Lewinsky!


Hope that makes you sleep! Or not!

Shubh ratri anyway!

Drew the sketch only because the outline of his face in b and w was so good! Loved sketching it in spite of less time and so much work!