Ooooohty

In the last three days I traveled in 3 southern states. Alongwith a friend who agreed to accompany me to ooty we spent two days in there.
We started from Bangalore in a bus. The bus journey started with a nice fresh-after-rain weather in Bangalore. Bangalore is some place which will have this cool breeze kind of weather all round the year. Not that it will not become hot but clouds tend to stick there mostly. Whenever I am there, more often than not I have seen rain. Anyways the bus journey took around whole 12 hrs to reach Ooty, which happens to be 300 km from Bangalore. We clicked a lot of pictures in the way. I was taking the isle seat so it was my friend who did most of the clicking. There was this couple and the kid with them on seat behind us. The kido[photo] was very cute and clicked his (or her) picture after getting kind permission from the parents.
After reaching the Ooty bus stand, two of us tried to find information from local people as to what all we can do/see in there. A guy met us standing in the middle of bus stand who claimed that his 'friend' has a guesthouse logging in the Mudumalai forests. Btw this forest also has forest safaris. So this gentleman immediately wards us off on a bus to this place. But while on the bus we get down at a place in between. As soon as we got down from the bus, we searched for public toilets and started the day with essentials. After that my friend had breakfast and I brushed teeth and had breakfast. Some of us are toothpaste conservationists. :D The weather was at its best when it started to rain. This place called Pykara had two things - 1) something what people there called waterfall[photo] and (2) a boat house where we never got a boat even after waiting 1 hour.
From there we got to the much famous 'shooting point' of the Ooty. It is a famous spot for many Bollywood films. Its more like a large hillock, a very gradual one. But nevertheless a very lively one.

And eventually it turns out such that we hitchhiked around Ooty the whole of this day. More than half our hiking was under umbrella which was our only home for the day! One umbrella covering one person, one backpack and one camera.[photo]

The day ended when we came back hitchhiking in the heavy rain back to Ooty to book a weary old looking hotel room for 1500 bucks. By the time we reached all our cloths including the one on us were drenched. We had no cloths to sleep in and only single blanket. Now we did not want to get cozy in a single blanket in this state but the chill was considerable. Finally my friend sacrificed and took bedsheets instead. :)

The second day was a little less happening. We booked a tour bus for tour of Conoor and ooty which eventually ended up in only Conoor because of time constraints. We enjoyed fulsomely the freshly made chocolates of Ooty, specially the dark chocolates. With an elated joyous feeling and undying memories we came back to Bangalore by a night bus. I had one full day in Bangalore before taking a train in the night. But it was good only for sleeping. :)

Bangalore-Ooty

A nice extended weekend and Im off for Ooty! In bangalore right now. With some old friends from IIT.

Lightening

Today weather was very kind in Hyderabad. We had gentle breeze running all through evening till night. Faint showers and lightening bolts in the night.

I had my first lightening bolt shot. The first one came very quickly and quite descent. It was handheld. Hence some stray light (near the right corner at bottom) can be seen

After then I held the shutter open for long times. Trials after trials but no luck. Lightening struck but was not in my frame. Then I zoomed out to increase the field of view and probability of capturing the bolt. But then it became too small sized. Hence the cropped image below shows too much noise. Even at ISO200!

Some keywords recurring in my brain these days:

The vicious circle
Big fish small fish
Karma
Succeed in life
Drudgery in office
Home
Freezing temperatures
i20

Sunday

Today was talk on the phone day. I called up and got call from may people. Was on phone for long hours. Its a nice way to spend time. Talking on phone and standing in balcony. Seeing people passing by. Relaxing. Nice way to spend your Sunday.

This little child on the first floor in my apartment is a cute one. I love small kids. I always did. Whenever I will see him, either going downstairs or upstairs, or sometimes he will play with his nanny on the ground floor space, I will wave my hands. And he waves back. Children always love that I think. And this is one of the things the learn quite early. Waving as in bye bye, clapping, flying kisses, good morning. They will learn all of them fast.

And today in the noon when I was in balcony talking on phone, this kid was in going in car with his parents I think, though Im not too sure if he was the same kid or not because this one looked much younger, but anyway he was waving from the window and also smiling probably.

And by the way this kid is the only being I know in my apartment. I hate this particular thing about Hyderabad. Or may be it is the case with all big cities. Dont know. But I find it very disgusting. People will not befriend with neighbours. This may be part of one other disgusting thing which is bachelor hysteria. But whatever its not to my liking. People here will look at bachelors with such a loathe. They will be shunned as if fountain of malice. People will literally shut their doors on your face.

There loathing is justified in some sense too when I look around some of the bachelor class people around. They will do not-so-decent things which no one would like to happen in their residential colony. Some few days ago one young couple was involved in something on the road at night which could have brought them close to being booked under Section 294 of the Indian Penal Code.

Mr. Feynman!

I remember from the days of second year of my UG education. When I was studying electromagnetism, I went through his book - Feynman lectures on physics. I absolutely loved those lectures and was in awe of the man and his style of writing a physics book. You could understand the deep concept of physics only be reading his text, without involving complex mathematicals. And now Im reading his book 'Surely you're joking Mr.Feynman!' And the timing may not have been more apt. Just before I am going to start phd!

It is just an amazing book. About life of an amazing person. How he becomes someone who he is. One of the excerpts shown below will show what his writing style was like in 'Feynman lectures on physics' and obviously hi-lighten his deep understanding of physics.

"I often liked to play tricks on people when I was at MIT. One time, in mechanical drawing class, some joker picked up a French curve (a piece of plastic for drawing smooth curves--a curly, funny-looking thing) and said, "I wonder if the curves on this thing have some special formula?"

I thought for a moment and said, "Sure they do. The curves are very special curves. Lemme show ya," and I picked up my French curve and began to turn it slowly. "The French curve is made so that at the lowest point on each curve, no matter how you turn it, the tangent is horizontal."

All the guys in the class were holding their French curve up at different angles, holding their pencil up to it at the lowest point and laying it along, and discovering that, sure enough, the tangent is horizontal. They were all excited by t his "discovery"--even though they had already gone through a certain amount of calculus and had already "learned" that the derivative (tangent) of the minimum (lowest point) of any curve is zero (horizontal).

They didn't put two and two together. They didn't even know what they "knew." I don't know what's the matter with people: they don't learn by understanding; they learn by some other way--by rote, or something. Their knowledge is so fragile!

I did the same kind of trick four years later at Princeton when I was talking with an experienced character, an assistant of Einstein, who was surely working with gravity all the time. I gave him a problem: You blast off in a rocket which has a clock on board, and there's a clock on the ground. The idea is that you have to be back when the clock on the ground says one hour has passed. Now you want it so that when you come back, your clock is as far ahead as possible. According to Einstein, if you go very high, your clock will go faster, because the higher something is in a gravitational field, the faster its clock goes. But if you try to go too high, since you've only got an hour, you have to go so fast to get there that the speed slows your clock down. So you can't go too high. The question is, exactly what program of speed and height should you make so that you get the maximum time on your clock?

This assistant of Einstein worked on it for quite a bit before he realized that the answer is the real motion of matter. If you shoot something up in a normal way, so that the time it takes the shell to go up and come down is an hour, that's the correct motion. It's the fundamental principle of Einstein's gravity--that is, what's called the "proper time" is at a maximum for the actual curve. But when I put it to him, about a rocket with a clock, he didn't recognize it. It was just like the guys in mechanical drawing class, but this time it wasn't dumb freshmen. So this kind of fragility is, in fact, fairly common, even with more learned people."

His knowledge was certainly not fragile in nature.

Party

When someone invites you to his (birthday) party and you are not sure whether it was genuine he really wants you to be there or he invites you because you were present somewhere sometime when and where invitations were being called. Then what do you do? I feel bad at disappointing inviters but it is difficult for me.

Moreover Im not a party guy. I dont drink. I dont dance. I dont date. Im not someone who will engage in conversations with lot of people with furore. I feel out of place in parties. I dont mind eating together with people at some place. But as to so called 'party' I become confused how to 'be'. There is no point go there and stay there and make other people feel that Im not having their kind of fun.

Im having that bad thing in my toe in the nails which happens to everybody at some point or the other. It hurts in walking. Just waiting for it to go.

Boring

Things have been quite boring in last few says. A friend responds to this saying what happened to your blogging? painting?
Then suddenly Im reminded that Im not writing? May be I should write more? read more? and if world permits may be take up colors again?
I have ordered a print copy of 'Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!'. But to worse I just the day after ordering online I caught hold of pdf copy and cant resist reading it during office hours. :( I will have to resist.