Swades

Every time I watch this film, my emotions go on a spin. I wonder why! I do not subscribe to new age nationalism but everytime I watch this film, I tell myself I am an Indian. Is it about a nation, a country, a society, a home...I dont know...but it is about me...critics have ripped apart the film...but still Swades is about me.

Terrorist....who?

Today on September 11, America mourns almost three thousand lives lost in a terrorist attack six years ago. Every TV channel that I have watched has been broadcasting those horrific images of planes hitting the towers, urging the nation not to forget that innocent lives were lost by that act of terror. I am somber too.

But I wonder, what about those lakhs who perished in Hiroshima and Nagasaki when America dropped atomic bombs on civilian population! Or thousands in Iraq…

RTI Repository

Amit Verma had an excellent article - http://indiauncut.com/iublog/article/turbocharging-rti/
Read the follow up post here
So CSS is planning to come up with this content repository. My first reaction to reading this article was that this should be open source as a content management system.
If anyone out there is interested, let me know and we can get in touch with Partha of CSS.

Twin Paradox

If Ram is in a perfectly non-accelerating frame of reference, or as it is called an inertial frame of reference, it would appear to him that he is stationary in his spaceship while Rahim and Earth are traveling in the opposite direction with the same speed. In that case will Rahim’s time dilate and his ageing be reduced by the same factor? Whose time is dilated…Ram's or Rahim's?

Twin Paradox: “Two twins, Ram and Rahim but not anymore, time has dilated but for which one?”

Relativity

Special theory of relativity says, "at speeds closer to that of light, length contracts, mass increases and time dilates." Imagine twins Ram and Rahim on Earth. Ram decides to travel to the nearest star 4.45 light years away in a space ship at a speed which is 86% of the speed of light, while Rahim decides to stay put in his home on Earth. The round trip for Ram will take (4.45*2)/0.86c = 10.28 years (where c is the speed of light). According to special theory of relativity, for those on Earth the ageing of Ram during his trip will be reduced by a factor ε = 0.5 i.e. 0.5* 10.28 = 5.14 years. This means that Rahim will be 10.28 years older when Ram comes back from his trip which took him just 5.14 years! Twins are not twins anymore, thanks to special theory of relativity.

Dakiya Daak Laya

“…khushi ka pyaam kahin, kahin dardnak laya”, as this song played on my car stereo, I gave in to a bout of nostalgia. I was wondering how many of us write letters anymore! I have not written any in more than a decade. It would be interesting to know when and to whom did you last write a letter?

Ustad Sahab

August 16th passed away unnoticed. It was the death anniversary of a legend. Ten years have passed since the death of Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. He was 48 when he lost the battle for his life in London. But the music lives on. He has sold more albums than Elvis Presley. Nusrat was one performer who left me wishing I were not an atheist. Someone once said about Nusrat, “Nusrat’s music invites us to eavesdrop on a man communing with his God, ever so eloquently. The deepest part of Nusrat’s magic lies in the fact that he is able to bring our hearts to resonate with the music, so deeply, that we ourselves become full partners in the offering.”…need I say more?