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What if? Well, that is not a question; well, actually it is but that is not the point! That is the name of a very popular book currently at its 10th edition with updates every year written by Randall Munroe!

The book seeks to answer questions which may be considered absurd or silly or may even initiate a psychiatric evaluation!

Now although the questions may be absurd, the author has made every possible attempt to answer the questions as scientifically as possible!

Growing up you might have asked questions to your parents like where does the rain come from or why it becomes dark in the night or where does the sun disappear!

And many times your elders like your parents or your grandparents would either tell you a fact which may seem scientific or some times simply give you an answer so that you would stop annoying them!

I have had answers like rain comes when someone opens the taps in the sky!

Of course when you were young (er!); you used to take the answers as they were given and even narrate the same to your friend with so much confidence that even Newton would be proud!

You would also think that the elders are so wise! Till you grow up and find the correct answer! What you think after that is up to your maturity!

With the advent of Mr Google and the net; children do not waste time asking such questions to you! Even if they do ask, more often than not, rest assured they would counter check your answer so do not give the ‘tap in the sky’ answers!

Luckily though there is so much information on the net that your role of giving a specific answer is still valid!

With that in mind; Have you ever wondered that well, for now the sun is so hot! But how long would it take for it to cool down so much that you could literally touch it!? If you were alive of course!

The answer in the book was there as an answer to another question and unfortunately is not very comforting!

Lets see what is the timeline of what is ‘theoretically’ (because this is only a theory! No one is going to be there to validate it you see! Or at least you and me may not be there to confirm the findings!)

Now in about 10 billion years, the Andromeda galaxy will have merged with the Milky Way. The Sun will be gone and its debris will be spread across new star systems but still the parts would be hot!

100 billion years in the future: The accelerating expansion of the universe is now carrying other galaxies away from us so fast that their light becomes too stretched out for us to detect, rendering the universe outside our galaxy effectively invisible! Now the sun is cooling but still not very cool! Literally!

Finally at about 1 trillion years from now, the long-lived white dwarf stars start to burn out! The good news though is that the remnant of the sun cools to the point where you could finally touch it! It may still be a little warm though!

Oh yeah I know you do not like cliffhangers! So in around 1000 trillion years from now, any remaining planets orbiting the remnant of the Sun will have been ejected into the void or crashed into it! The stars are dark and the sky is empty! You may of course get to say, “I told you so!”


You can tell that or maybe sing! Though it may not be like the sweet voice of Hariharan!

Shubh Ratri!

If you had seen the movie interstellar then you are brave! If you have understood it after viewing it once then you are either lying or being pseudo brave!

The way it tells about Black hole and the passage of time is really super cool though! Then again this has been mentioned in a book written thousands of years back!

Hope you know Balarama!

The plough wielder!
The mighty mace warrior!
Guru to Bhima and Duryodhana
In Bhagwath Puranas he is known as the ninth Avatar of Vishnu

we will come to the link later!

Let us go back to Interstellar!

In movie interstellar, Coop’s (now do not ask me, Coop who!? The name is not important but the essence of the message is!) team decide to land on Dr. Miller’s (?? again not important!) ocean planet.

This planet is orbiting Gargantua, the massive glowing black hole that exists in the foreign galaxy. Due to Gargantua’s massive gravitational pull, “every hour on that planet is seven years on Earth”!

A massive tidal wave hits the spacecraft and delays their exit! When they finally go back to the space, by their calculation only three hours had gone! But for the person waiting for them in the dock and for people on the Earth; they find to their shock that 23 years have passed!

This is because Gargantua warps space-time; its gravitational strength bends Miller’s planet, stretching and squeezing it toward and away from the black hole. Einstein’s theory of relativity is key to all this. His revolutionary 1915 theory proposed that the larger the object, the more spacetime is warped and twisted.

One hour for someone maybe a lifetime for someone else! Coop’s daughter who was hardly 8 years old, three hours back is now close to 32 years! She has not been in touch with her father for so long! In fact when he goes to another planet and revisits his daughter on Earth station; his daughter is now an old lady over 90 years! While he was still 30 odd years old!

Emotional but so much science and physics which only Nolan being an engineer himself could have imagined!

Now for the interesting part (finally! I know reading this blog feels like being close to the black hole!!)

In Bhagwat Puran there is a story where the King of Mathura or Revata left to Brahma Lok to find a groom for his daughter REVATHY!
They will go and meet Brahma who was let’s just say a little busy so they waited for a while, then they met Brahma and were blessed that Revathy would marry a great warrior who wields a plough!

What they did not realise is that though it was only one year since they left Earth and went to meet Brahma; when they returned thousands of years had passed! Since one year for one year of Brahma and Brahma loka is many years for mankind and when they returned thousands of years had passed!

So much so that even humans who were apparently huge when Revata was king were the size you see today! Now of course all did end well in his case since Revathy did end up marrying Balarama! 

But the warping of time and the passage of time close to the black hole and the Brahma loka would definitely make you wonder for a while or eternity depending on how close you are to the black hole!

Now if that is making your brain spin and dance then please do! As Remo D’Souza says! ABCD! Any body can dance!

Shubh Ratri!

There is a singer who performs and sings continuously all through the night!
Without missing a single line and without referring to notes!
What is more surprising and amazing is that he does not know how to read a single letter!

William Dalrymple’s seventh book is about the lives of nine Indians, a Buddhist monk, a Jain nun, a lady from a middle-class family in Calcutta, a prison warden from Kerala and a devadasi among others, as seen during his Indian travels.

If you chance upon the audible version narrated by the author himself you can feel the passion and intent! You can understand how he is completely in awe of the culture and traditions! It is like a person roaming in the desert all his life and then given a taste of the best drink in the whole universe! Water!

You of course have to ignore his pretty abysmal pronounciation of Indian words and his really poor understanding of many things which are happening! Even some basic stories he gets so wrong but the point here is not the fact but the message!

I have always stated this that in the quest of correctness, do not miss the intent behind the message!

Another puzzling thing is how in spite of his limited knowledge of language or culture he knows so many things with pride while we run away from tradition!

He talks about the Bhopas!

The Bhopa people are the priest-singers of the folk deities in the state of Rajasthan. They perform in front of a scroll, known as phad (par in the Rajasthani language) that depicts the episodes of the narrative of the folk deity and functions as a portable temple.

William Dalrymple narrates in his book about the most famous Bhopa artist called Mohan Bhopa who used to perform continuously and even over night!

He used to remember his lines when in fact he was illiterate!

You would think why he had to be illiterate! But sometimes the mind has to be empty before you fill it!

So being illiterate is apparently a requisite since then you would just repeat what you heard without your own ‘literate’ mind! Of course the talent is natural and made better with practice! The song and the words has already been written and perfected and those who have to carry on the tradition must be expected to do so without any ‘remixes’ or new thoughts and modifications which may hamper the sanctity of the original!

Of course many may not accept this ‘condition’ which is why there are only a few singers and maybe even some of the last ones.

There are also very few actors of the calibre of
Manoj Kumar! Even now the scene where he played Bhagat Singh is forever frozen in our memories.

He literally invented the hand over face style! Can’t sketch him without that!

You will be missed

Jai Hind…

If you happen to read Nexus or Twenty Lessons or Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari, you will be shocked that there are jobs which are soon going to be taken over by the AI!

The top three shockers in his estimates were Taxi drivers, postal workers and Pilots!
Yes! Pilots in the list is pretty shocking! We will come to that soon!

In a recent list by the Forbes though, Pilots are safe! For now at least!

They have included jobs which are going to be taken over by AI which actually have higher probability to be gone by 2025!

According to their ‘expert’ analysis which of course was done by a human (with help from the AI!) states that there are areas which could be better handled by the AI or by automation! These are manufacturing jobs (machine operation, product handling, testing, packaging, testing, etc.) and retail and commerce roles (customer service, inventory management, fraud analysis)!

Not to forget the Basic data entry, analysis, and visualization jobs
Financial analysis and projection roles and also travel agents and itinerary providers and Translators!

When you go through the list you would realise that most of the above list is already true! Even when I get stuck with a patient who speaks a different Arabic than routine, I used to call the translator some years back! Now all we both do (the patient and me!) is whip up our phones and get the Google translate!

The shocker ( at least for me!) in the list was the fact that human drivers are being replaced through autonomous vehicles, such as what we’re already seeing with Waymo!

Driverless cars will soon be the norm while mails will be completely automated!

You would think that your job or talent is something which a bot can never get then well, you may soon be proven wrong!

Like in Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot; the lead (Will Smith in the movie version!) asks the rogue Robot if it can write a symphony or paint a masterpiece!
The intelligent and more evolved robot fires back much to the shock of will “can you?”! It is not easy to make Will speechless!

If you are then planning to make your son or daughter a pilot then do it soon! Yuval states in the books that apparently pilots use the autopilot in the plane most of the time!

The onboard computer takes into note of the weather, altitude and distance and does the rest! In fact the only chief time when pilots are really needed is landing and take off! That’s the reason why they announce and do it I guess! But many automated machines are being taught to do even that!

Talking about Drivers and Pilot reminds me of this scene from amazing work of Goswamy Tulsi das, the Ram Charit Manas; When the driver of the Boat refused money from Bhagwan Ram he said that; “People belonging to the same profession do not charge each other for the same service!”

Sri Ram asked him, “How can we have the same profession?”

The boatman said, “We are similar Sri Ram! I am the guide of this small boat and river, while you are the guide of the whole universe!”

Luckily the AI can never understand the emotions behind those lines!

Wish you all a very Happy Ram Navami!

Jai Sri Ram!

Animals see colours differently than we do!

Even with all the colours in front of our eyes we see only what we want to see! This is because our eyes are not that developed but our brain is!

We actually have some of the weakest eyes! (Mental and physical!)

Even an average Octopus has eyes larger than its brains!

Go small! Take the Horsefly! They have massive eyeballs that join at the top of the head, and the horsefly males have two different sized ommatidia (the photoreceptor units that form insects’ compound eyes).

The larger ommatidia at the top of the eye are more sensitive to UV light, and help him spot the fast-flying female flies, while the smaller ommatidia help him hone in on details! Wish an average man had that and he would notice the new hair cut done by his wife!

Then you also have the California purple sea urchin which is so packed with photoreceptors on its surface that its body has been described as a single functional eye! Because nearly the entire sea urchin is sensitive to light, it can ‘see’ in every direction. Researchers have suggested the sea urchin uses its spines to block out some of the light hitting it, to help focus the light for better vision!

Or you can look at the average Chameleons who have some of the strangest eyes on the planet, which are able to move independently of each other. This results in almost 360-degree vision! The next time you have been instructed to watch the gas and as well as the kids, you may need this!

The reptile though can also switch between monocular vision – when both eyes are used separately – and binocular vision, when both eyes are used to look at the same scene!

Technically, rods interpret light, and cones interpret colors. These are the receptors in our eyes which ‘detect’ light!

Now Animals that are truly colorblind completely lack cones, and animals that can only see during the day completely lack rods!

But these extremes are uncommon, and most animals have a combination of cones and rods.

Now meet the Mantis Shrimp!

Now compared to humans’ measly three color-receptive cones, the mantis shrimp has 16 color-receptive cones, can detect ten times more color than a human, and probably sees more colors than any other animal on the planet!!

They can see in ultraviolet, infrared, and even polarized light. Not only that, but their eyes are on separate stalks and are able to move independently of each other, meaning they’re able to keep an eye watching out for predators and prey in two different directions at once! They are the only animals known to be able to see circular polarised light! Experiments suggest they may use this to send messages to each other – for instance, ‘this burrow is occupied’.

See the power of the rods and cons!? Though practically speaking the final image is actually ‘seen’ by your brain! Which is why the brain can sometimes be tricked to ‘see’ even objects or person which is not there!

Which is also the reason why the human is so developed in spite of having weak eyes! His or her brain can cook up stuff even if it is not real! Real and reel also is the deal with humans who can make movies for you! Like the producer Vipul Amrutlal Shah!

Now close those eyes and try to shut down the brain or atleast put it to sleep!
Shubh Ratri…

Think of this and you can imagine a person who wants to have fun and dance!!

The actual meaning was a person who is very rude, loud, or stupid!

Then again it was only an acronym for a much bigger full form!

Then again it was short lived just like the shout!

Enough suspense! It was YAHOO!

You may think that the site was named after a bunch of nerds who were secretly fans of Shammi Kapoor and his dance moves and catchphrase!

Why secretly then since the nerds did actually call Shammi when it was launched in India! This was because the name and the shout was already popular here!

But (then again what is a blog without a single but! with a single t!); the name was actually based on Yahoo as defined in the novel Gulliver’s travels!

There are races of fictional beings in the novel (most beings in that novel except the human were fictional of course!) who were an unsophisticated, rural Southerners! The general definition being bunch of rude rowdies! Like ‘some yahoo cut me off in traffic’ or ‘a bunch of yahoos were making noise outside’!

Then again it was not even called that! The first name when Yahoo! was founded in January 1994 by Jerry Yang and David Filo, who were electrical engineering graduates at Stanford University was “Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web”!

The Guide was a directory of other websites, organized in a hierarchy, as opposed to a searchable index of pages!

In April 1994, Jerry and David’s Guide to the World Wide Web was renamed “Yahoo!”.

Finally what did the full form stand for you may ask if you are crazy or gone Yahoo!  Well, it was “Yet Another Hierarchically Organized Oracle” or “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.” Take your pick and say Yahoo!

After that you must read about the inspiring tale of K.P. Ramasamy!

He is known as appa (father) that his employees refer to him!

Today, some 27,000 women have completed their education, even earning an MBA in many cases, while working at the Coimbatore and Tirupur-based KPR Mill. Some have become nurses in nearby hospitals, a few work at IT firms and many have returned to work at KPR Mill!

When factories across the country sent away their labourers during the nationwide lockdown in 2020, KPR Mill gave its workers a choice: If you stay, we will provide you food, shelter, full salary and entertainment. Each of their 12 factories has a cinema hall, sports facilities and an auditorium. “100 per cent of the people said we will stay here only,” says KPR. The company has around 25,000 employees!

Now here’s the staggering numbers – In the last several years over 24536 girls have finished their 10th, 12th, UG, PG courses!

They have their alumni in almost all hospitals where the girls are working as Nurses, school teachers, some have joined the Police force and the list goes on and on!

In a recent convocation over 350 girls received their degrees and out of which 20 of these girls are TN Open University Gold Medalists.
They received their degrees and Gold medals from the TN Governor!

In the Forbes List Of India’s 100 richest people, one of the faces include the now 74-year-old KP Ramasamy. He has secured the 100th position on the list with a net worth of ₹19,133.7 crore!

Now you definitely can say YAHOO! With pride and joy of course!

Shubh ratri…

The days after the Sextant and before the GPS!

One fine day I was to leave the college for good and had packed my bags and stuff and got a bus ticket for the night! Only one thing left to do!
Collect my 1000 INR from one of my seniors!

He was a scary guy and I could never say no to him! Then again it was not the first time he borrowed and he usually gave it back in a couple of months!

Now since I was leaving college; it was time to close the deal!

He was a chronic and no one knew where he lived except for one junior who felt pity on me!

Now he had no idea about the address since he had gone only once! So he gave us a direction! It may be vague or accurate depending on your intelligence!

He said, take a right after a bakery and keep going for around 2 km and then after a bend you would see a tree placed oddly in the road and then take the second left after that tree and after a while you would get a small crossing from which you have to take a right and then you would get a field with a single house of two storeys! The house would be locked from outside but someone will be there!

Now of course he said stuff a little different than this but you get the gist! Remember that it was around 25 years back and my memory is not  eidetic!

In spite of the vague direction, the most surprising thing is that we reached the house and rang the bell! It was locked but my senior’s sister did answer from inside! He was not there apparently!

In spite of our luck of finding the house, we were unlucky!

Years later I managed to track him in Orkut! I messaged him and asked for the money and was very happy when he replied by asking me my account details! By the time I replied, the partial luck ran out again! Orkut was out and FB was in!

Will let you know if I could contact him on FB!

Still I am thankful to my Junior who gave me the coordinates! Now of course I would have just asked for the location! Imagine travelling by the ship in the olden days without the GPS!

Apparently they used to use a device called the Sextant. Sextants were used by explorers like Edmund Shackleton to navigate across the oceans. This tool uses a two-mirror system to measure the angle of a celestial body such as the sun in relation to the horizon. Despite being relatively simple, sextants were incredibly accurate!

All it is is a device that measures the angle between two objects.

The sextant makes use of two mirrors. With this sextant, one of the mirrors  is half-silvered, which allows some light to pass through. In navigating, you look at the horizon through this mirror. The other mirror is attached to a movable arm. Light from an object, let’s say the sun, reflects off this mirror. The arm can be moved to a position where the sun’s reflection off the mirror also reflects off mirror A and through the eyepiece. What you see when this happens is one object (the sun) superimposed on the other (the horizon). The angle between the two objects is then read off the scale!

What makes a sextant so useful in navigation is its accuracy. It can measure an angle with precision to the nearest ten seconds. (A degree is divided into 60 minutes; a minute is divided into 60 seconds.)!

If you understood the above then you are really clever! The direction on how it works was similar to the direction given by my junior! Destination attained though!

Now now do not worry! Just call Sam! In this case, Sam Bahadur aka Field Marshal Sam Hormusji Framji Jamshedji Manekshaw MC! He will show you the direction of victory!

Jai hind..

SHubh ratri…

He was inspired by none other than one of the greatest detectives ever and named after a great sportsman and later on went on to become the inspiration for a search engine name!

He was also inspired by the author’s own valet!

As far as Valets go, the most famous before Batman’s Valet AKA Alfred was most definitely JEEVES!

Jeeves was your go to guy for any problems in life!

By the way be informed that Jeeves is a valet, not a butler; that is, he is responsible for serving an individual, whereas a butler is responsible for a household and manages other servants!

On rare occasions he does fill in for someone else’s butler. According to Bertie Wooster (his ‘master’), he “can buttle with the best of them”.

Those were the times of the rich and the high society (read white!); and to have some other guy as your manservant may be considered well, in my daughter’s words; cringe!

Then again the stories also used to show how the Valet was much clever and better and well informed than the ‘master’! 

If you take out the obvious racism; they were a great read specially when you wanted a quick laugh! The Jeeves one liners are among the best and funniest one liners ever!

If you liked such novels then a serious version could be The Remains of the day by Kazuo Ishiguro. Here also you actually have ‘masters’ who try to show off their respective ‘valets’ or ‘Butlers’! On how knowledgeable they were or how well read they were!

If treated with good pay and respect then it is more of less the job of a wise counsel!

The most important thing was that you could ask Jeeves anything! And he will not judge you (at least not openly!) and try to answer your questions (no matter how dumb they were!!) in the best possible way possible!

Which is probably why one of the best search engines of the past was called ASK JEEVES! Of course it could not handle the Google tsunami! No search engine can actually come close to Google since it already has a huge search database and well, experience! Then again even Nokia fell!

“There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself, ‘Do trousers matter?'”

“The mood will pass, sir.”!

That was one of my favourite ones!

Mentioning Butler or Valet and Jeeves and Batman; you must remember Val Kilmer aka ICEMAN! All said and done, he was actually right when he said that Maverick is well, Maverick!

Of course he was super cool in Batman and the Saint…Val Edward Kilmer you will be missed.

The other day we were going through our favourite past time! Seeing our old snaps in the slide show on TV!

It is always fun to see how you used to look and most of the time when you see old snaps you would be amazed at the changes in yourself and others!

I am of course telling about the external changes!

One video was of us playing “peek-a-boo” with my son!

Apparently the game “peek-a-boo” is actually a very impactful game!

The game is linked to a phenomenon called the Object permanence!

Object permanence describes a child’s ability to know that objects continue to exist even though they can no longer be seen or heard. If you have ever played a game of “peek-a-boo” with a very young child, then you probably understand how this works.

When an object is hidden from sight, such as by covering it with a blanket or another object for example, infants under a certain age often become upset that the item has vanished!

This is because they are too young to understand that the object continues to exist even though it cannot be seen.

Now most children if they are young would not know that the object is still there! They would assume that the object has gone!

In a study to see if object permanence was present, researchers would show a toy to an infant before hiding it or taking it away. In one version of the experiment, researchers would hide a toy under a blanket, then observe to see if the infant would search for the object.

Some of the infants would appear confused or upset by the loss while other infants would instead look for the object. The researchers believed that the children who were upset that the toy was gone lacked the understanding of object permanence, while those who searched for the toy had reached this developmental milestone! Which meant that the child had grown!

One consequence of the development of object permanence is the emergence of separation anxiety. Once infants know that objects and people persist when they are no longer in sight, they often become upset when parents and caretakers are no longer visible!

Which is why when you say “peek-a-boo” and ‘appear’ and ‘disappearing’ then most of the time your child feels happy (he or she has to be your child and/or you must be familiar to the child or at least pleasant looking by the way!)! This reinforces the belief that you may go for a moment but you will always come back!

That’s a beautiful thing to know!

Ending a colourful day with a splash of colour!

Shubh ratri!

A friend of a dentist getting hurt in a party leads to the use of this as an anesthetic agent!

If you are amazed then its ok! If you laughed, well that is ok too!

In the basement of the building, a large-scale machine was producing a gas under the supervision of a young Humphry Davy, who was encouraged to experiment with new gases for patients to inhale.

The first important work of Davy was examination of this gas and the publication of his results in the book: Researches, Chemical and Philosophical (1800). In that publication, Davy notes the analgesic effect of this gas and its potential to be used for surgical operations.

One of the effects of the inhalation was that it caused the person to laugh at even a bad joke! Now now, I hope the stand up comedians of today do not get any ideas!

The gas was thus called “laughing gas”!

Yes! That was the common name for nitrous oxide!

Despite Davy’s discovery that inhalation of nitrous oxide could relieve a conscious person from pain, another 44 years elapsed before doctors attempted to use it for anaesthesia. 

The initial use of nitrous oxide was as a recreational drug at “laughing gas parties”, primarily arranged for the British upper class and this became an immediate success! Guess the British Upper class would do anything to make them laugh! Even if it is not true!

While the effects of the gas generally make the user appear stuporous, dreamy and sedated, some people also “get the giggles” in a state of euphoria, and frequently erupt in laughter!

During one such party when, nitrous oxide was strictly still a party toy and people wanted to laugh like a Hyena; there was an interesting observation. 

A friend of a dentist took too much of the stuff at a laughing-gas stage show and gashed his leg real bad! Normally he would have howled in pain like a, well Hyena! But in this case he was not responding normally! 

The friend hadn’t realized he’d hurt himself since he had no pain!

The dentist then realised that it could be used as and analgesic anesthesia!

The dentist was Horace Wells who used nitrous oxide for the first time as an anaesthetic drug in the treatment of a patient and in dental surgeries.

Today, nitrous oxide is used in dentistry as an anxiolytic, as an adjunct to local anaesthetic.

Nitrous oxide was not found to be a strong enough anaesthetic for use in major surgery in hospital settings, however. Instead, diethyl ether, being a stronger and more potent anaesthetic, was demonstrated and accepted for use in October 1846, along with chloroform in 1847. But the fact that a gas can be used as an anesthetic agent was first demonstrated by the laughing gas! 

And all that happened when an overdosed guy in a stage party hurt himself! Of course let that not be a point in favour of overdosing and getting wild at a party! 

Be like the doctor who turned even an accident into a investigation! Talking about doctors do read about the first lady doctor Anandibai Gopalrao Joshi…

An inspiring life indeed…

Now go for the non anesthesia induced natural sleep!

Shubh ratri