Phone Book Memoirs

Rushing through my mobile phone contacts I hurried past a few hundred names.
Names of people; some new and some loooong forgotten. I stopped at one particular "Suresh" and scratched my head.

Now who was this Suresh..when did I add him.. was he a code name for some guy I didn't want mom to read... was he from my home planet...was he someone I added in the future and forgot to erase before I went back in time? Simple questions like these are bound to arise in anybody's mind. I ran a search query in my head for a long time and then recalled that it was a canteen-wale-bhaiya from my office training center! Almost everyone had his number and we used to call him up for random tasks in the good ol' training days.

Ok...having solved that mystery I wondered if there were more such memory games in the contacts which I could play. A lo! A whole bundle of mysteries, mind benders and teasers lay packed waiting to be solved.

I started my journey alphabetically discovering surprising answers which were all locked up inside my head since the Pyramids. I looked at every name and thought about that person for at least a minute. In that time frame I tried to do a quick jog about how they made me feel, all the experiences I shared with him/her...etc etc...and found it to be quite an emotional roller coaster! It was like going back and reliving all those experiences. Some people who I had not in touch with..I gave them a call and had a good chat. Some birthdays were coming up which I was sure to forget had I not done this little exercises. An old teacher, a long lost friend, updates from people with whom I had not talked to in ages...sighhhh

I also went through my digital diary (remember those things?) which was luckily still alive (praise casio!). It was funny how cool it was to flaunt those things a decade ago. OOoo he has a digital diary...so awesome..it works on solar cells..totally rocking!!... LOL!!
And my real phonebook diary made with paper (remember paper?)...THaT was just somethings that blew my socks off! I have it since the last 15 yrs of so, and it was filled by other people, very much like a slam book. The funniest thing was that I had little red checks in front of a few names. After much thinking I recalled that they were put to remind myself that "they" were the ones who hadn't offended me in anyway and were in my "good" books! Hahha the kind of things kids do :P

Anyways...the point of writing all this is that I highly recommended you to do these at home. The stunts were performed by a thorough unprofessional and should be attempted.

Science is the Poetry of Reality

Climate Change

Even as the leaders of 192 nations are busy debating in Copenhagen right now, billions of people around the world are still not convinced with the argument.
What is surprising is that many people (mostly journalists and non-scientists) have picked up bits of information from skeptics and have used that as their sole base for argument against the facts. The facts that they might not even know about.

I was watching 'dateline' on BBC today and was amused (and shocked) to hear the points put by Janet Daley of the Daily Telegraph. If journalists have such views then so will their readers!

Here are bits of information the skeptics pick up from the media and formulate a case against years of scientific research:

1. Warming is a natural phenomena which has been happening for centuries due to solar activity, and the natural climate cycle: People use this to say, "well hence rise in CO2 levels cannot be due to human actions". --: There is a CO2 cycle in nature and warming does take place due to it and due to solar activity but the exponential rise in temperature over the last 100 yrs is NOT naturally happening. The rise in the CO2 levels and hence warming has been proved by extensive research spanning over 30 years involving many countries. Also, there is not a single scientific paper which refutes global warming due to human activities.


2. There has been noticed a slight drop in temperature in this decade: A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system. Ten years is peanuts compared to hundred million years old climate cycle.

3. Forcing countries to make cuts in emissions will stop development and progress: At what cost? These people forget the enormous environmental cost 100 times or more than the entire world economy! We might be able to continue with the emissions for a few years and then when the climate will play havoc it will all collapse.
And how will it stop progress? All we trying to do is replace an existing bunch of inefficient fossil-fuel based technology with a more green, non-pollution, healthy and renewable one. It can only take the world forward.

4. The spokesperson of USA said at Copenhagen that rich countries cannot pay for this because they didn't know that CO2 emission would cause global warming until recently.: This is not true as the data and proof was available in the early 1970s, or even earlier. It has been suppressed by lobbyists and greedy companies and have pressured scientist for years to modify their data. Even during the 1st IPCC report we heard voices of scientists expressing concern how politicians and oil companies were hounding them to tone down their findings.

4. The scale is too great, it cannot be done, it cannot be enforced: Wrong, the technology exists to save our lives, it can be done and enforced it people realise that the very survival of the future generation (in fact the current generation) depends on it. People should listen to the "meek" but hardworking scientists all over the world rather that their showy television know-it-alls who are funded by the polluting firms.

I encourage you to go look at data provided by NASA, IPCC etc and other websites and read scientific papers (or at least articles written by credible scientists) and look at the pictures of receding ice-covers and glaciers over the last few decades then form your opinions.

Here are some more graphs for your reference:

yawn

My head hurts because my work involves 10 hrs of computer staring and my eyes are burning. Oww, I am not really sure if this physical distress is brought on by work or the unimaginably noxious air outside. There is a vile haze seen from the satellite images hanging over India and China. I already have enough ailments to write a novel (Horror obviously) about. God, I think I have aged 5 years after a year of working. Everyone in the IT sector is so damn unhealthy....
I am exhausted after climbing up two to three storeys. :(

Dynamic Pendulum >>

Time. No, not the coaching institute...though i did join it last year for CAT. Gave most of its exams and finally decided not to sit for it. I thought it would be better if I gave it after gaining more work-ex. And as you know I will start my preparations for it tomorrow. "Which tomorrow?" is a good question which I will answer, you guessed it--tomorrow.

So coming back to Time, I just have this super-weird feeling is running faster every 10 years. I clearly remember till 1997 life moved like a lot like me when I get up at 11 am and hunt for my glasses. Slow, unsteady, drowsy and drooly . Then from '97, it hurried like it wanted to race me till my school bus. From 2007-- a whoooooooshhh, accelerating rapidly, just couldn’t focus >>

I remember a few earmarked pages in my history.
"telling myself only one year left before I sit for my 12th board exams"
To a friend: "2 years left for college to end, and we have so much to do!"
"I won't survive the first year of work", then surviving and celebrating it!
.
.
.

Seems strange and unreal, especially when you read all those silly sentimental forwards your friends send you about and suddenly realise they are true!

Is God tweaking some “constants” in his lab?
Help me out here if you feel the same. And oh, the speed of time please?

Ever felt like me?

Ten thousand heavy metal machines rotating at a million revolutions per second. Crashing into each in a billionth of a second and breaking into smithereens. Huge chunks flying off at odd angles, twisting and spinning as they go against the heavy polluted air, dragging their rough edges against it.
The noise is so loud that I can’t see! It has shut off everything. It’s happening so fast; it’s happening right now--now which you can’t really think about because it’s already over. Time has its hair pulled till its strings start disintegrating. The structure, the sense, the meaning of everything has begun collapsing. It is not an end, it is not a beginning. It is never. The second has taken its claim over the minute, hour and year. The present has come to dominate. The time’s up.

I can't sleep when I feel this way. There is a mental image of all this which is same and extemeley heavy. I can feel its weight on my nerves.

WORLD ENVIRONMENT DAY

Stop Climate Change. Now.