I have been a big fan of sports ever since I was ten. Cricket, Football, Hockey, Athletics, I participated in every Sport I could. I really wanted to continue doing so. I am pretty sure there are millions out there who started out the same way. Some want to be Astronauts, most want to play Sports. But, even though the number of Astronauts in the world is negligible compared to the latter, we are more likely to be encouraged in pursuing it since it 'portrays' ambition.

I fell for it. I don't regret the fact that I couldn't be a sportsman. I probably wouldn't have been a star. But boy, I wish I knew that for sure.

Now, in India, our failure in bringing medals is always blamed on the lack of infrastructure and investment by the Government. It is true that bureaucracy has put India in a virtual coma. The incident with O P Jaisha is a clear indication of that. But what about us? We complain about Sania performing only because of her partner, Martina Hingis, in Grand Slams. We complain about Indian hockey being completely behind their Golden days. We also complain that India will not do well in any sport apart from Cricket. And the cherry on the cake, we would also cringe about our kids playing and watching too much of sports.

The hypocrisy in this country is unbearable. The tenacity to cringe about anything and everything is intolerable. What happened to the kid gave up sports to work hard in studies? He became a clueless kid, barely keeping himself afloat in the sea of mediocrity. He could have become a great sprinter, shooter, footballer or a hockey player. But you pushed him to be an average engineer. He could have won awards at the international stage. But you insisted that swiping you attendance card daily in a meaningless job would be much better for you.

I know this doesn't mean that we don't think about backups at all. We definitely should complete our basic education. We should be intellectually curious. But if you force him to do all of it, he would be nothing but average and invisible. He would lose out in his confidence.

In India, we think about what others think than reflect on ourselves. We need to change that. Forget the nosy neighbour would be 'defame' you in the so-called society. Just imagine how proud you would be if your son or daughter stands on the podium with the Indian national anthem playing in the background. 

Finished off yet another amazing book today. The Innovators! I have always been in awe of the creators of technology. The people who made computers in every home a reality. The Innovators is an excellent documentation of the collaborative effort of hundreds of futuristic visionaries who have passed on innovations after another to the next generation to perfect it even more.

The book begins with the documentation of two visionaries in the 19th Century, where technology only meant innovations in the manufacturing industry. Ada Lovelace was an incredible person to have envisioned something which has become a common appliance in every home. Machines with a brain of their own with human interaction was predicted by her more than one and a half decades ago. Charles Babbage was another name you can't forget.

I Like the parts with von Neuman, who came up with the architecture of the first computer. It was well designed and the building blocks of more complicated architectures that followed.

Vannevar Bush's As We May Think came up so many times along the journey of the book. It mentioned the memex machine which is the basis of every computer in use today. The futuristic book is something I want to read some day in the future.

Bill Gates' journey in creating Microsoft is very inspiring. He worked his ass off and just kept going no matter what to achieve his goal. No wonder he is the richest man in the world. I also admire the fact that he is a complete geek, who reads philosophy, fiction, literature with equal zest as he would do with technology.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page also show that innovative and disruptive ideas are just around the corner. They solved a problem which people never thought they would ever have. I guess all good products start out with people not realizing what exactly they want. Whether it is Apple, Google, Facebook, all entered uncharted territory and created mind numbingly awesome products to which people are addicted to.

Very inspirational for managers trying to create a disruptive innovation. Collaboration is the mother of Invention, not Necessity. This is what the book taught me. Computers, from use in defence for fighting wars, became daily use appliances simulating war in games.

There is nothing else to say to these great individuals who disrupted simple human life to something awesome.

Ever since New Horizons has come into the picture with all the relentless talk about Pluto, it has put me misery with some incredibly depressive thoughts in my mind. Pluto was discovered in the 1930s, and it has taken man to cover almost a century to get close look at the tiny planet at the edge of our Solar System. It took New Horizons around 9 years to reach Pluto. 9 years!

Pluto is around 3 billion kilometres away from our planet Earth. Think of this when the next time you take a cab or your car for the closest of destinations. Now, if you think about it more, just imagine if it has taken a whopping nine years just to get a clear snap if the furthest planet in the Solar System, how far are we from discovering any other life form ever.

See, I have no doubt we are not alone in this universe. You’d have to be very arrogant to ridicule the idea of other life forms apart from the ones here. We are situated in one of the most insignificant of galaxies in the Universe, revolving around the most insignificant star in the Milky Way. If our Sun was an engineering student, he must have been one of those unseen students you only see on graduation while collecting his certificate, wondering was he even there in our class?! That’s how insignificant we are!

I hope I may have convinced you about the existence of other living organisms. Now, it all goes haywire. I so want to meet an E.T., a Jadoo, and every other alien that ever came to us in the sci-fi movies. There may be a possibility that aliens may have come to the planet but that it for another article. I will focus on how we could find them. Probably it may be most difficult game of hide and seek because you know what to look for, you know where to look for, but you just can’t yell and tell that you found them.

Astronomers have estimated about hundred habitable planets in the Milky Way. Now, that sounds like something we could easily figure out. Just send them radio messages and see if they ever reply, or just go the planet with a probe and observe it closely. Now, what is wrong with this plan? The galaxy spans a whopping 100,000 light years wide. That means light takes 100,000 light years to travel across the galaxy. (Sounds like one hell of a journey though! :P) I wouldn’t bore you with the concept of light since we all know about it. But let me tell you that the maximum escape velocity ever achieved by any space probe is 70km/s. It would take us 18,702 years just to reach the closest start to Earth, Alpha Centauri, which is just 4.2 light years away. See the difference?

Now, suppose all our scientists across the globe took inspiration from Interstellar and started working on constructing a wormhole to go to a planet say 300 light years away. We spend all our earth resources on creating this wormhole and bend space time to reach the destination in say 15 years, how do we know for sure that the planet is there presently? I mentioned 300 light years, which means what we are looking at something which is 300 years old. Now, suppose if 150 years ago a solar flare wiped out all life from the planet, or a black hole gobbled it up entirely, or maybe there was a Hitler over there too, who incidentally managed to win the World War and destruct the planet completely. All those resources, all the efforts would literally go down a hole, a wormhole.

Every habitable planet that we have found is only accessible through light and other radio waves. We 

are constantly broadcasting messages across various sections of the Universe in the hope that we get a reply. But, would the human species be still live 600 years down the road? That’s how long it would take just for realizing first contact with the hypothetical planet we created. Suppose we do manage to survive on this planet by evolving into a species who breathe carbon dioxide and run cars on solar energy, how would we know if they survived the 300 years after transmitting their own message? (Of course, at this moment I am assuming they speak English too!)

The vastness of the Universe can be so thrilling and intimidating at the same time. The enormity of the galaxies, the intrigue of finding life, the adventure of exploring ‘heaven’ can all be overpowered by that sickening feeling that we would never be able to do any of these. The stomach-turning feeling that Interstellar can just be a movie.

Even though, I am one hell of an optimist. I may not believe that God would come to Earth again and relieve people of their melancholies, but …oh but I do believe that Earth would be visited by that falling angel from a different dimension land on my doorstep or any doorstep for that matter and boot out my miseries.

We three dimensional people are so naïve that we just cannot comprehend how to go about beating the one directional time dimension. (For more knowledge on Time Travel) We just can’t imagine that time can be just another physical dimension and not something to be stretched, compressed or even rewind. A four dimensional creature could do a lot more. He may just drop in to say hello and go back in a matter of seconds.

Maybe the pyramids were made lending their help, maybe the Bermuda Triangle is their entry and exit point to and fro, you never know. Although, all of this can be discussed in another article.

For now, we just are too small, too dumb and too far from any sort of startling discovery of alien life in the Universe. Optimism is overshadowed by the darkness of how distant the dream of seeing an extra-terrestrial is!

Everyone has the one little place in their mind they dream of going at least once in their life. Nature has so many faces that each and everyone’s dream holiday location differs from one another. Some prefer a day in the sun, away from all the fuss of office and just enjoy the sea breeze in their faces and return home with a nice tan to show off the next day. Some want to trek and hike the tallest mountains, get to the edge of the highest point and shout their lungs out into the valleys to hear them echo back. A few would prefer getting out in the wild, explore nature’s craft when it comes to staying alive in the densest of forests and get close to other breathing organisms. To the contrary, there will also be a bunch of lazy bums who would like to spend their dream vacation in the most luxurious of hotels around the world, sipping the costliest cocktails and taking a tranquillising massage by the poolside.

I certainly come in the nature loving side of things. Although, I do want to live in the wild, trek the most enthralling trails and climb the tallest mountains, none of them is my dream destination. I hope everyone has heard about Aurora Borealis a.k.a. The Northern Lights (or Aurora Australis). If you haven’t heard or seen pictures of it then you are about to be taken to another level of astonishment about Mother Nature.

When the first time I came across this very spectacle of nature, I was stunned by it. After that, my only goal was to go Aurora chasing! Let me now give you a few facts about Auroras. Aurora is named after a Roman Goddess of dawn. This phenomenon occurs in the vicinity of the Earth’s magnetic poles, both North and South poles. They usually are very clearly seen during winter nights at either poles and discovering them at day times is a lot harder. The best part about it is that every time they do appear in the exosphere, they have a completely contrasting shapes and sometimes vibrant shades of colours too.

A Solar Storm

Now, let’s get to the part on how they actually work. The origin of this beautiful spectacle of nature is also the reason for almost all life on Earth, the Sun. The Sun’s core is where most of the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium takes place. It releases gigantic amounts of energy in the form of heat. This heat travels to the surface of the Sun in the form of eddies. Everyone who knows the science behind induction or understands the working of a transformer is familiar with the concept of eddy currents. The exact same thing happens on our source of life energy too. These eddies have their own magnetic fields when they travel towards the surface. Sometimes, this field which also consists of the fused gases and particles, extends its arms off the surface. They twist and turn in the form of a rubber band and eventually break out from the Sun’s surface. And hence, the journey of several billion tonnes of gases trapped in the magnetic field hurled into the Universe begins. This is knows as a Solar Storm. Scary, huh!

The solar storm reaches speeds in millions of kilometres per hour making its journey through the solar system. It might take less than a day to reach Earth. But when it does, the magic truly begins. Our incredible planet shields itself from the massive magnetic energy with its own magnetic strength deflecting the storm and coupling the fields. Since, the magnetic lines move form pole to pole, the coupling causes a funnel type path for the gases to filter onto the exosphere above the poles. Now, the gas particles ionizes the atmospheric gases leading to the phenomenon called Aurora. It is so riveting that something as dangerous as a solar storm could create something as beautiful as the Aurora.

Now you know in what category of people I come in. I want to witness tiny little gas particles light up the winter night sky with beautiful indentations of colours and texture across the horizon. The thought about the chill in the air, the longevity of the nights and the thrill of the anticipating such a sight grips me in every way possible.

Today, I may not be able to make the journey to my dream destination. But, there will co

me a day, ignoring all the work, snubbing the fast-paced city, I would pack a bag, take a plane, go to Norway, find a shore on a secluded lake, set up camp and just let myself get lost in mesmerisation of a bewildering exhibition.

Leave your comments about your dream destination. I would love to know!

Recently, I stumbled upon a quite unique and incredible movie, Predestination. The concept of the movie was so unreal yet unambiguous. The explicit details the story covers are indeed mind boggling and leaves quite an impression on you. To give you a small excerpt from the movie, it is based on the much debated concept of time travel which also includes a generic secret government organization which prevents crimes before they even take place. Interesting, huh! I can’t tell you about any more details as it would ruin your experience if you haven’t yet watched it.

Anyway, coming to the point, the movie actually made me wonder is time travel really possible? Is it indeed possible to alter your present by changing the past? Can you avoid an apocalyptic situation if you could glance into the future? There are so many questions that linger around and I am not the first one to ask them as well.

According to the string theory, there exists eleven different dimensions in the Universe. Let me tell you how it works. We live in a three dimensional world. We have shapes, sizes and we can easily alter the matter to take different shapes and sizes. We can travel through space, from one place to another without any rocket science applied to it. That’s what third dimensional people are restricted to! Actually, we also know about the fourth dimension, that is, time. But since we are a 3-D planet, we are clueless on how to bend time and travel across it.

In a 4-D world, time travel would be a piece of cake! Suppose you flunk an examination, you can easily go back and tell yourself not to make the same mistakes again. Maybe it won’t be as easy as I made it sound but it certainly would be possible. Suppose we take an eleven dimensional planet, we couldn't even imagine what all they would be able to alter! Maybe they would change the state of matter without the use of heat. Maybe they could convert matter into energy or vice versa with a click of a button. I am just speculating here but it could be easily true. And that’s what we can only do, speculate. Just like a man in the two dimensional world, could only move sideways and would never enjoy the luxury of a panoramic view.

Coming back to time travel, all my research says that theoretically time travel is very much possible. Let’s talk about the concept of time. Time is not the same for all of us as we have seen in the movie Interstellar. The Christopher Nolan narration showed a snippet of it when time was relatively slow on a newly discovered planet than in the spaceship that they travelled in. All this looks amazing and enthralling to watch onscreen but is impractical in reality. Did you know that the satellites orbiting Earth who travel at more than twenty thousand kilometres per hour are actually moving a little into the future? Each day the time is about 50 microseconds slower in the satellites that gives them a fractional peek into the Earth’s future.

Speed is the one and only cause for this kind of dilation. If we do travel with the speed of light, we could make everything around us slower than we are, and consequently, travel into the future. How easy, huh! Although, when we do tend towards the limit, our body mass could go up indefinitely. Hence, the energy needed to keep us moving would be infinite too. No bike, no car, no aeroplane nor a spacecraft could do that if it used the entire energy source of the planet, or maybe even the Sun. Maybe we could get atomic particles seconds into the future, but not enough to make a significant difference to normal life.

Now that was all about travelling to the future! Is there a way to go back as well? Well, theoretically as well as in the movies, everything is possible. Though finding cosmic lines left after The Big Bang or the discovery of a wormhole could make that a reality, we are nowhere close to finding a real solution.

And then there comes another problem, the paradoxes! Predestination paradox is something that was discussed in the movie but I wouldn't discuss it because of the aforementioned reason. I will talk about the Grandfather Paradox. If you travel into the past to your grandfather and shoot him, he would not have been able to give birth to your father which in turn would not have led to the creation of you. So, that means you could not have come into the future to kill him because otherwise you wouldn't exist. Freaky, isn't it? There are innumerable situations you could discuss when it comes to paradoxes of travelling into the past.

Time travel, if at all possible, is only possible forwards. You could slow down the forward movement or fasten it, but you cannot reverse it. Maybe if could invite a species from the fourth dimensions for dinner and ask him how.

But for time travel enthusiasts, here’s an awesome tip. If you really do want to gaze into the past, look up at the sky. The ocean of twinkling marvels, is your complete timeline of the history of planet. The light that we see presently of minutes, months, years, decades, centuries and sometimes millenniums old. You gaze at Alpha Centauri and you look back four years into time. You look at Andromeda and it takes you back 2.2 million years, the time the human race was evolving. 

Everything about time, space and energy is fascinating. The more you read, the more you wonder. The more you wonder, the more you read. And there continues the vicious cycle!

I live in a country where the history is more important than the future. The past reflects in the eyes of the folks. While the only people who really do look into the future are supposedly the astrologers. What I have never understood ever in my life is how can the movement of a particular planet or a constellation which may not even have all the stars from the same vicinity decide how my life will pan out. What intrigues me even more is the relevance of a pooja to the Gods to plead my stars for forgiveness, for a clean slate, for all the sins I may have committed.

The country which has produced 37% of NASA’s population of scientists, who are desperate to find the answers to how the Universe works, has an even large bunch of morons who relate it to your past, present and future. I am not saying that none of their predictions ever come true. They are actually not a bunch of morons. They know their Math better than anyone else. They play the game of odds while deciding the future of a particular person. And god forbid if something doesn’t go according to their predicted script, they would blame it on the Gods and how it’s important to please them with a particular custom.

Suppose, you want to get married. You’re this one desperate person who can’t find a guy/girl on your own. So you go to a fool (I will address all the future tellers as fools) to look for the solution. What is so wrong in me that I am not able to find a partner? (I am such a pathetic desperate person. I want to have sex soon. Please help.) And then the game begins. He knows in his mind that there’s no way you could end up unmarried. Come on! The odds of staying single in a country like India for an average person is nil. You’re bound to find your match (or so they call a stranger in India in an arranged marriage). This is where he uses his Math. He tells you that Jupiter is the reason causing all the problems in your life. If you really want to find someone, you need to please the planet. He knows that eventually you will get married and he could all the credit for it to extort even more money from you when you would want to have a boy instead of a girl as your first child. Then he says, “Oh wait! There’s Mars on your way to Jupiter too! You should try to make amends with it as well.” Now, he has all the cards in his hands. He can even make you dance on his tunes by convincing you that one of Mercury’s craters is not letting you sleep at nights. Or that your anxiety is because of the Moon, that it’s not letting you breathe properly since it has no atmosphere. The fear of offending a random assortment of rocks (Mars) and a big huge balloon of gases (Jupiter) is both illogical and idiotic.

The Indian, Chinese and the Greek mythology is filled with a lot of stories about Stars and Constellations. There is nothing more fascinating to hear about how one of the seven sisters from the Pleiadas got lost while swimming in the Milky Way, and how Taurus tried to attack her, and was slaughtered by the knight in the shining armour, with a dagger on his belt, Orion. He came with his two humungous dogs, Canis Major and Canis Minor to save the day for the seventh sister. You surely must have heard about memory tricks and how they work. This is how it actually works. In an ancient world, where documentation was a pretty big burden, creating an unrealistic story in order to remember the position and the shape of stars and constellations is truly enthralling.

So, it doesn’t mean that a dog up in the sky or twin sisters above you could change your destiny or have any effect on your future. Maybe the dog on the street could chop off your balls and affect your probability of getting married. (A very important qualification to get married in India, working balls!)

Everything that I have mentioned is not to offend any believer of God or his own Astrologer. This was to give you a little insight about what the Universe is all about. Everyday hydrogen combines with hydrogen to form a new star. Everyday a new black hole is born which could suck you in it in a jiffy. Would you run to your fool to save you then? The Stars could destroy you in many different ways. A Black hole, a Nebula, a solar flare, or mere UV radiation. But they unquestionably cannot hurt you in the way your Astrologer narrates.

Stories were made to keep the people entertained since they had no television or internet. They narrated the ill fate of betraying your God, since they had no law or order. They made up interesting characters of the stars, since they couldn’t remember positions of each individual star in the sky without relating one another. Just imagine if they had just written down all the positions rather than making stories about them, would we have had the “Science” of Astrology. Something to think about, ain’t it?