Brief history of time: my edition

May the new year bring you all that you need, want and desire while destiny is watching up close :) Problem with being under a microscope is that even the smallest thing appears to be a big "issue"...lets hope that this new year is progressive and full of positive change for all of you...from my side in a little bit...signing off 2019...signing in 2020. :) still learning to take a photo or two with the DSLR...this was in the garden today with rather shaky hands...! :) To making new friends...to hopefully "settling down"...to learning a few new tools...to try my hand at the cam a bit more...to a few new lenses and most of all hopefully a gym membership that i will actually use for once in my life so that my hands don't shake while handling the cam :) To all the usual suspects in my life and the whole lot of you who left an impression on my life in the past year...even if we exchanged one email or hello in the whole year...wishing you all a happy and ...

L to R: Milan, Ashish, Sachin, Suril, Alok That time of the year when the firang's visit...lecture us on not being late for dinner...and arrive 30 mins after the decided time :) It was a cool time with the usual suspects...keep visiting dudes.

L to R: Sachin, Javed, Asim, Geogy, Ashish, Danny, Shehzad and Fehmi Christmas morning breakfast treat from me to the boys...happy belated birthday!

CAA and NRC...hot topics today for those who didn't bother to read the draft...either one...!!!  The problem with these scholarly types is that their scholarship extends only until the edge of their sphere of influence...which is the BIGGEST problem today...people en-mass are so carried away by the words of the so called enlightened...i mean in this matrix people management is this biggest challenge...but to manage these dummies takes special ability...on one side we have everyone from the PMO to the shahi imaam making a direct statement that no Indian needs to worry about their citizenship...and on the other hand we have paid goons who have nothing better to do than sit breaking stuff all night and day...the sad part is in the middle of all this anti-govt protest the law and order is turning to dust due to the illiterate opposition goons who have no idea of the concept that they are supposedly protesting against...there were days when electronic media in any form was consid...

So it happens that the grid of communications technology coupled with pollution is cooking this planet and NOT ONE communications company is willing to make public the data on how much the cellular and other wireless communication companies are heating up the atmosphere...we know for sure that there are many other forms of pollutants...but i believe that the strongest pollutant is the continuously radiating cell towers, satellites and cell phones...this planet does not have the balls to shut down cellular communications because its a virus fed to the humankind and they are all infected...if you are a smart kid Greta...take on the communications companies...because i know you cannot take on the space based radar of the military giants...someday i hope you realize that i will be long gone after this post...but you may still have an inkling of a chance of being that catalyst to save the planet...maybe the Arctic space based radar for SAC or NORAD wont give you the heat maps over time fo...

A brief visit to the rocks by the beach yesterday...the image is a bit touched up in the blue plane. :) Some flowers in the garden...unedited :) classic macro :) unedited...! My room...when the roof is removed :)

Some say the definition of a developed nation is where the rich use public transportation...well in that gray zone of comfort while travelling we have changed from a 2x2 Asiad 25 years ago to the new Volvo's and Scania's in today's times...how automotive tech has changed...the 2x2's still chug along on the expressway but the power of the new machines like the Volvo's is unmatchable...its a good machine and i have seen them make themselves useful over the past 13 years of Mumbai-Pune travel...as luck would have it i always have managed to retain my seat number four at the Sunday 4:30 bus for the better part of thirteen years...the journey is always entertaining when there is a talkative person next to you...anyways...the Shivneri service has been very kind to me over the years...most of the staff at Dadar don't know me by name but they are aware of me as a familiar face...I have never found government transport to be as efficient, well maintained and clean ...

The "sarkaari naukri" definition in a good light...just saw "Mission Mangal"...both failure and success shown in good light...only the impact is not probably 1:1 in terms of that feeling when a critical system goes bust...having a 450 crore rocket go to smoke is much much more than the raising of ones hair on the skin of the neck...fortunately the mission to mangal has gone very well...there are a few things that are at times purely funny and probably not allowed in the context of mission monitoring [rebooting a system through a power cycle]...this is like saying we'll reboot an jumbo aircraft in mid air and everything will just normally come back up since its "supposed to" :) [at least i hope that's not how things work...!!!] or well even the praying for the autonomous guidance system to work :) in reality these systems are tested, software simulated, re-tested as hardware in loop and tested some more just to avoid a failure scenario...this ...

There seems to be a lot of encouragement behind the dudes at IITM creating the "Shakti" chip...during my conversation with my guide at IITB i learnt that there was a similar attempt to create a chip at IITB...take a bow creators of "Ajit" (seen here)...we were generally talking about the interface for the Navic chips as compared to the US GPS system when i asked why we weren't building drones with a light Linux interface using the Shakti chips where we'd need a barebones PWM, UART, I2C and SPI and maybe CAN interface... unfortunately this interface requirement was already shared with the "Ajit" guys and guess what...there was no response to the request even though the departments are still 50 meters away from each other to date...!!! Even today if ten Aero grads sit and just think of apps for drones with the guys from Elecs there is no end to the applications of drone tech that can take off...not that im being partial to IITB (as it was always...

Even the gardens are precision cut at IITB :) This is the one place i can go even when i'm really low in life...it brings new life in these aged bones just to interact with the kids who will be the future of this country long after i'm in the stars...! Time to come up with a drone based on a simplified version of the Shakti chip and a bare bones ported Linux version :) Not sure that the Navics are available...but this would be a truly huge scale verification of the GPS concept put up by India...i mean even if the other countries dont use it, the chaps could sell millions of drones and the system could self correct itself if the proper feedback channel was provided into great precision.

Was sooooo hoping that this mission would work out and we'd be there on the moon but alas fate seems to have intervened...the mission objective was sadly half achieved...the guys and gals at ISRO would have really liked to have had a lander on the surface...no issues...the processes are strong enough to contain what we missed this time around... that we will return and there will be a flag on the surface is a given ...all said and done...the space cowboys gave it everything...lets hope for a stronger tomorrow...always keeping in mind that the powers to be will not allow us to leave this ball until we clean up our act here...and mother nature is slowly "waking up" to the fact that mankind has screwed up way too much. Of all the stars in the sky i think i have always had a special place in my heart for the moon...some thing makes me believe that i belong home...i got silver in the moon and the stars...gold in the morning sun...well tried ISRO...you guys de...

In remembrance of this idiot who lost the one he thought was a genuinely nice gal...broken arrow :( As maleen rightly pointed out in your case you dummy you should have been point...broken comm :( And as it goes with all frigging weddings...everyone except the two getting hitched were deciders :( And they say the strongest of us all do not cry...its just that no one stops to ask if we are ok...ever...!:( Package received...thanks...dumb thing is that people think returning a saree or losing some deposit on a hall is all too important in a process of bringing two families together at a stage where the rings have been bought...some times adults behave like children...i was hoping that the children would behave as adults...!!! anyways...ill be around....you know where to find me on the internet or well as they say "you know where i live" :) If trust is not love i don't know what is...!!! And i don't want the world to see me...coz i do...

At IITB we get to meet and be supervised by a lot of government officials...it was a bright sunny day on commencement and graduation that we had the better luck of having the PM visit for the function...we observed that they rushed through the various exhibits in zip time and left for their next appointment...while on campus he tried to understand every single topic shown to him with interest...of course a lot was dependent on the people doing the explaining...as the highest government official in this country i think it is base line irritating when people dig into him and call him names...folks dont understand that the very nature of a leader is the virtue of his advisers and his team...without them no leader can function and no government can survive the rigors of day to day work with such a huge populace...his stint as CM three times has shown that the transformation of Gujrat is miraculous and we wish that the same would happen to every corner of India...I dont know much be...

On that fateful day in May we got news that a MiG-21 from Jamnagar air base had crashed and that the pilot's body had been so badly burnt that there was no way to identify it...the pilot it was said stayed in his cockpit trying to avoid the village below could'nt eject at the time that would have saved his life...they don't allow pilots to carry anything besides their tags...routine mission they said...close to the border they said...poor boy never even got the chance to be brought home so that his mom could say bye to him...his father had to go to Jamnagar AFB to complete the last rites...lived up to the finest traditions of the IAF they said...in time the family got rid of his clothes, the trunk, his bike... only thing that remained was the flag folded and his wings...those wings i still keep in my wallet to date...grandma cried and cried until she could cry no more...no way to console her...and just like that the tiger was gone...his friends and the entire Lohegaon ...

@Transformers...its just dusty old books she said...in my library @this matrix...everyone is a book...a book that has been partly read...one that will rewrite itself a bit for the future...i've tried being at peace with myself for over twenty years now...so much difficulty in controlling my mind...but at the end i managed to find a way to ignore the junk in my head...sad part is that the junk never goes away...the system tends to shove your life in front of you irrespective of age, sex, situation...some times we learn sometimes we don't...and the reason we don't learn is often that we don't readily relate that the same situation occurred many years ago...and we had reacted differently but we don't remember...in the process of being able to control up to a point the thought process i've learnt that there are at times so many needles at play in our existential framework each trying to control a voice in the head, a pin in the fingers...it is difficult to be ...

The skills of a satellite "hit" squad are entirely dependent on how fast you can traverse the stack...it is not every day that 3-D holographic interferometry becomes essential as you need to study which bird was used for what...!!! When I was in the US we had a guy come over form one of these defence majors to explain how satellite to submarine communication used to be done in the "old" days and how it has modernised over the years. While discussing the topic at hand he said they used to use the lasers to paint a pretty big area on the sea surface to communicate with the sub because they did not know the location of the damn thing...while this use to eventually solve the problem as the sub would reply if it was in the painted zone...it raised a huge big problem for the submarine as it would create huge big shadow on the sea floor giving away the subs position...!!! When i was at school it used to bother me that we used to loose a lot of pilots in the ...

I once almost asked someone who retired as a very high government official if he had seen "taare zameen par"...but then i realized maybe he and team never looked for the Taare on this untouched zameen...! Sometimes its not very useful to print in the newspaper that the government is looking for kids with special abilities...very few parents want their kids subjected to being lab rats for some agency that "does not exist".  There may however be an idea to gather this information...the stars are always watching and charlie visits in the clipper ships quite often to ensure that the little kiddo is all right...i seriously dont know how many taare there are walking this hallowed ground...however every taara has a signature and a purpose...as i told my friend in Rolla once upon a time...if you go looking for optical signatures...you might see the sky light up like never before...these kids are protected like no one else...this coming from the boy who troubled the am...