From Martha .. with love

Its very peculiar - how the most trivial of things can affect your life in a way that leaves a lasting impression and makes you realise things never thought of before. This time, for me it was a very sweet old lady, and I'd call her a lady not a woman because of the grace and dignity I saw in the twinkle of her eye that was far more precious than the depth and beauty of even the most famous work of art.

Friday evening was the usual boring simulation stuff and upon that I had a very fruitful meeting with my prof. A very simple craving popped up inside me to have ice-cream, sounds kinda silly though :P So I set off on foot to the ice-cream parlour in the city centre and on my way I bumped into a puny little figure, frail and tender as if the wind could blow it away with a single whisp. Was reading a document which is why didn't notice what had happened. But I guess the slight knock in the knee brought me back to the present. I turned and saw the tiny figure again trying to balance a bicycle and 2 bags of groceries. 'Twas an old lady, I felt bad, and offered her help. I really envy the German language as it makes even the hardest of sentiment seem polite and well-intended let alone the general stuff. Well having asked her if I could help in German, I got a German reply that was even more polite as she wilfully accepted. As we walked, she talked a bit about stuff - general enquiry about my purpose of stay, etc. - things you generally ask strangers if you happen to get along with one :-) I couldn't help but wonder why would she walk a bicycle if she knew she was going to buy so much stuff. Well the halogen lamp finally glew in my brain and I realised that there's something wrong with the bicycle - the chain had slipped off the gear system. One good thing about us Indians is that whatever can be handled on our own, we master that craft - and one of them is bicycle maintenance ;-) So after asking her politely if I could have a look at it .... got down on both knees and wrapped it right up and woala !! the bicycle was cured ;-) Wondering what was so special about that ?! Hang on .... now the really special moments unfold :-) As I got up, something clasped my head and God was it a firm grip and before I knew it, got a peck on the forehead. I distinctly remember having blanked out at the moment :P It was all so sudden and unexpected that someone could be so thankful for a mere fixing of a bicycle; that they could be so affectionate and full of gratitude for something I never considered a big deal - a triviality that filled me with joy as it made someone else's day too.

Well if you think the story ends here, just hold on it gets more interesting :-) What I just wrote in is a one-off stranger helps stranger account but what I am going to tell you now is something that I wouldn't even have given a probability of one in a billion of ever happening. Saturday - a holiday and time for grocery shopping for me, I went down to Penny Markt (supermarket) to grab stuff for the entire week. As I came out of the supermarket, guess whom I bumped into .. AGAIN !! Yup, same ol' lady ;-) She asked me to wait up for 5 minutes if I could do so, and I still don't know why I agreed to that. At least she was true to her word has she came out after approx. 5 minutes carrying with her a bag full of candies, chocolates, chips etc. - kinda weird for an old lady don't you think? I thought so too, but I let it pass for the time being. Well I told you na German is a very polite language and its this very quality that forced me into complying with her request to walk her home :P We got into talking about a lot of subjects actually and was a very enticing conversation as a matter of fact, where, for the very first time I got views on things from an elderly person. She told me about her past - a half Brit and haf German, her visit to India in the 1950s, her appreciation for Indian culture, hospitality etc. The conversation became so informal that I drew up the courage to ask her about the chocolates, to which she gave me a fair enough response - her grandson was visiting her that day :-) Time passed by and I didn't realise that I had actually walked her to the Bahnhof (train station). It was time for lunch and she invited me over, but my hunger gave way to politeness and I declined :( She insisted once or twice and gave up. As I bid adieu and turned away to walk back to my hostel, she lay her hand on my shoulder - the warmth was soothing - inexplicable !! I turned back around and she handed me a pack of 3 Mars bars. I refused instantaneously saying that it was for her grandson and he'd be happy to have 'em. The reply I got shall remain in my memory forever - it meant a lot - the words shall echo as a reminiscence of the day I walked her home - "In the past 2 days sonny, you have been more than a grandson to me and if anything, I wish you were my grandson in reality" , followed by a very petit smile, a Mona Lisa I daresay. A sudden rush of emotion took the form of a large wave inside me and instinctively I bent down to touch her feet. She caressed my hair and uttered again in her very feeble yet sweet voice "God bless you my child, you are very special, shall never forget the 'Junge aus Indien' ". With these words she turned around and walked slowly towards the pavement leading up the other side of the Bahnhof. Absolutely dumbstruck, I stood there for at least a minute wondering at what had just passed.

People crib about stuff all life long and forget that the very special moments in life are to be treasured and that these small instances can change your life forever and make you realise the purpose of being what you are - a facet you never knew, a feeling you never acknowledged was inside you. Of all the things I missed the most at the Bahnhof, my camera tops the list, coz it was something in that very special moment that I wanted to capture on film and treasure it for all my life. Yet the more I think about those days, the more the impression deepens and the clearer everything gets in my memory - a very sweet lady came along and without any effort did the most simplest things and brought a smile to my face. To some of you this may sound a load of crap and nothing special, but I totally understand, you would have to live that moment to realise how it affected me - it sannot be described in words - but whatever be the case - will cherish these 3 Mars bars for a very long time :-)

An enquiry into "Twin Paradox"

Consider a pair of brothers, identical twins. One gets a job as an astronaut and rockets into deep space. The other stays on Earth. When the traveling twin returns home, he discovers he's younger than his brother.
This is Einstein's Twin Paradox, and although it sounds strange, it is absolutely true. The theory of relativity tells us that the faster you travel through space, the slower you travel through time. Rocketing to Alpha Centauri is a good way to stay young.

Or is it?

Some researchers are beginning to believe that space travel could have the opposite effect. It could make you prematurely old. The problem with Einstein's paradox is that it doesn't fold in biology—specifically, space radiation and the biology of aging.

While the astronaut twin is hurtling through space, his chromosomes are exposed to penetrating cosmic rays. This can damage his telomeres—little molecular "caps" on the ends of his DNA. Here on Earth, the loss of telomeres has been linked to aging.
So far, the risk hasn't been a major concern: The effect on shuttle and space station astronauts, if any, would be very small. These astronauts orbit inside of Earth's protective magnetic field, which deflects most cosmic rays.

But by 2018, NASA plans to send humans outside of that protective bubble to return to the moon and eventually travel to Mars. Astronauts on those missions could be exposed to cosmic rays for weeks or months at a time. Naturally, NASA is keen to find out whether or not the danger of "radiation aging" really exists, and if so, how to handle it.

Science is only now beginning to look at the question. The reality is, very little information about [the link between] radiation and telomere loss. With support from NASA, Scientists are studying the problem. What they learn about aging could benefit everyone, on Earth and in space.

Like the fuse of a time bomb, telomeres are long strands of repeating DNA that shorten each time a cell divides. When the telomeres become too short, the cell's time is up: It can no longer divide, a state of affairs known as "replicative senescence."

Without this built-in fuse, human cells would be able to continue growing and dividing indefinitely. In fact, scientists believe that cells evolved telomeres as a way of preventing the out-of-control cell growth of cancerous tumors. Because of telomeres, most human cells can only divide 50 to 100 times before the time bomb goes off.

One current theory of aging holds that, as the cells of a person's body start to hit this telomere-imposed limit, the lack of fresh, new cells causes the typical signs of aging: wrinkled skin, failing organs, weaker immune system, etc.

Whether or not telomere loss actually causes aging remains a matter of debate. The fact that shortened telomeres go hand in hand with aging is well documented. People with shorter telomeres, for example, are known to not live as long on average as people with longer telomeres. But mere correlation doesn't prove whether telomeres are in fact the cause.

Well it's hard to prove cause and effect in these things. But there's a sufficient number of these correlative studies from a variety of different investigators that one has to start believing that short telomeres are a marker of aging.
Recent research, performed by Frank Cucinotta and colleagues, showed that iron-nuclei radiation (a chief component of cosmic rays) does indeed damage the telomeres of human cells. To prove this, they exposed laboratory dishes containing a kind of human blood cell called lymphocytes to beams of both iron nuclei and gamma rays. Until recently, such a thorough analysis of telomere damage would have been prohibitively time consuming. But a new cell-staining technique called RxFISH (Rainbow cross-species Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization) allowed Cucinotta and his colleagues to look at many telomeres simultaneously.

"We had this surprising result that iron particles are much more damaging to telomeres than gamma rays," Cucinotta says. He suggests that this difference might be due to the wider path of damage caused by iron nuclei. Telomere strands wrap into elongated loops, like little knots on the ends of chromosomes. Gamma rays can only strike one side of these loops or the other, but iron nuclei can affect both sides at the same time, inflicting lasting damage on the telomere—possibly causing its complete deletion. This explanation is still speculative.

The task now is to quantify the risk telomere damage might pose to astronauts, so that mission managers and the astronauts themselves can make informed decisions about the risks they face. For example, astronauts who have had the greatest exposure to space radiation, such as the Apollo astronauts who traveled to the Moon, tend to get cataracts about 7 years earlier than other astronauts, on average. Cataracts are a common symptom of aging.

Of greater concern is possible aging of the brain and spinal cord. Experiments with rats have shown that brain tissue is vulnerable to "aging" by iron-nuclei radiation-this according to research by Jim Joseph of Tufts University and Bernie Rabin at the University of Maryland.

However, if scientists can tease apart the exact ways that iron-particle radiation affects telomeres, they may be able find a way to avoid or correct it. The solution could be as simple as a pill containing DNA-repair molecules. For the time being all we can do is to wait and watch or may be get little involved.

Art Of Blogging

It may be said that there are three kinds of bloggers. In the first place, there are those who blog without thinking. They write from memory, from reminiscences, or even direct from other people’s blogs. This class is the most numerous. In the second, those who think whilst they are blogging. They think in order to blog; and they are numerous. In the third place, there are those who have thought before they begin to blog. They write solely because they have thought; and they are rare !

But although the number of those bloggers who really and seriously think before they write is small, only extremely few of them think about the subject itself; the rest think only about the articles written on the concerned subject, and what has been said by others upon it. In order to think, they must have the more direct and powerful incentive of other people’s thoughts. These become their next theme, and therefore they always remain under their influence and are never, strictly speaking, original. On the contrary, the former are roused to thought through the subject itself, hence their thinking is directed immediately to it. It is only among them that we find the authors whose names become immortal (sorry e-immortal).

If a blogger has something to say that is worth saying, he need not envelop it in affected expressions, involved phrases, and enigmatical style; but he may rest assured that by expressing himself in a simple, clear, and naive manner he will not fail to produce the right effect. But on the contarary we find many bloggers implicitly displaying their poverty of ideas, mind, and knowledge. A great number of bad bloggers seek out their existence entirely by the foolishness of the e-public, which only will read what has just been written without putting anyconscious effort to ‘understand’ the head and tail of the subject.

Obscurity and vagueness of expression are at all times and everywhere a very bad sign. In 99 % of cases they arise from vagueness of thought, which, in its turn, is almost always fundamentally discordant, inconsistent, and therefore wrong. When a right thought springs up in the mind it strives after clearness of expression, and it soon attains it, for clear thought easily finds its appropriate expression. A man who is capable of thinking can express himself at all times in clear, comprehensible, and unambiguous words. Those bloggers who construct difficult, obscure, involved, and ambiguous phrases most certainly do not rightly know what it is they wish to say: they have only a dull consciousness of it, which is still struggling to put itself into thought; they also often wish to conceal from themselves and other people that in reality they have nothing to say. Like many blogs that I have seen of my batchmates in sastra, they wish to appear to know what they do not know, to think what they do not think, and to say what they do not say.

Truth that is naked is the most beautiful, and the simpler its expression the deeper is the impression it makes; this is partly because it gets unobstructed hold of the reader’s mind without his being distracted by secondary thoughts, and partly because he feels that here he is not being corrupted or deceived by the arts of rhetoric, but that the whole effect is got from the thing itself. A blogger should guard against using all unnecessary rhetorical adornment, all useless amplification, and in general, just as in architecture he should guard against an excess of decoration, all superfluity of expression. Everything that is redundant has a harmful effect (except in RDBMS !). The law of simplicity applies to all fine art, for it is compatible with what is most sublime.

A blogger must always try to say what is worth saying with true brevity of expression, while avoiding diffuse explanations of things which everyone can think out for themselves… and if all this you could have thought without me giving a small assistance then may be I should apologise for wasting your precious time !!

NON-VERBALITY OF THOUGHT


Is verbalization necessary for thought ? Well am not going to convince you for a 'yes' or a 'no'. All I am going to do here is to take you to the different intellectual planes of reasoning where you will be responsible for your own stand.

Well first of all I would like to quote Mr. Albert Einstein on this mater:

"the word or the languages, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism of thought. The psychical entities which serve as the elements of thought are certain signs and more or less clear images which can be "voluntarily" reproduced and combined... The above mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some muscular type. Conventional words or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in the second stage, when the mentioned associative play is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will."

So far as I have observed all our thinking is done visually in terms of non-verbal concepts, although the thoughts are often accompanied by inane and almost useless verbal commentary such as "that thing goes with that and that thing goes with that thing."

Often we have difficulty translating our thoughts into words (Even people with good vocab face this problem). Often the reason is that there are not enough words available to express the concepts that are required. And most of the time these concepts are innate feelings and deep thoughts that rise only to find that they don't have the right word to which they can cling and float for others to see.
As a related observation I had notices, on occasion, that if I have been concentrating hard for some while on something of my interest and someone tries to engage me suddenly in conversation then I would find myself almost unable to speak for several seconds.

hmmmm.. But this is not to say that we do not sometimes think in words. It is just that we find it useless in most of creative art like doing maths, science, painting etc. Other kinds of thinking like philosophizing, seem to be much better suited to verbal expression... May be because they(philosophers) immerse themselves into the meaning of 'words' like life, mind, matter, body, etc and their associative 'meaning' they don't reach to any definitive answers, And I feel unconscious mind( I don't know what the last two words mean in terms or language! ) still holds a lot of secrets which are hard for 'words' to explore and make sense( means ?).

As I write this post am pretty much convinced that much sophisticated conscious thinking can be done without verbalization and I insist that words are totally absent from my mind when I really think and I fully agree with Mr. Schopenhauer when he writes, "thoughts die the moment they are embodied with words".

May be we can think without words, but to communicate, to appreciate, to abuse, to be known, and to 'some' degree to show our consciousness we need 'the art of word and its maintenance' and may be this is the reason why many philosophers seem to be of the opinion that language is essential for intelligent thought.

Now if I 'think' where I stand on this issue then my answer will be
ummm.... :)

A promise

People often think of the past with deep regret for the fact that it cannot be relived either to experience it again or change - whatever be their desire. This craving doesn't get attenuated with time but infact is bolstered with the numerous tensions that accompany passing time. We tend to believe that beneath the stains of time, feelings disappear and people change. Wouldn't disagree but just want to make a few observations - is this change permanent or transient, who brings this change into effect, do we have any say in the change and if so can we stop ourselves from changing? An instant reaction to all these questions would be to simply blurt out that it all depends on the change but all I'd like to ask is that who decides what character the change has - good or evil? At times this decision can be taken based on certain norms and principles we define for ourselves but usually its not that 'einfach' (simple). Life is very subjective in nature and such objectivity is very rare to find in reality. One may wonder at this juncture as to whether my support lies for change or against it .... and to that I can only smile and say that does it matter?

If you're still lost wondering about the purpose of this post, let me bring you out of your misery and clear up the hazy parts. I guess I have changed over the past few weeks and believe that am still in transition. People tend to judge you by the way you present yourself to them and hardly ever strive to dig in deeper. Change need not have any character and can affect any aspect of your life and to this point I agree that often situations force you to change, but in the end isn't it upto us to let that change take control of our priorities or make that change adjust with our lives? We may be sitting ducks but at least we have the determination and will power to channel that change in a way that does not prove to be detrimental to us !! Why is it then that people whom you hold dear fear your changing? Why does a sense of insecurity arise with people who are sure of your being beside them for life when they speculate about the future? No matter how much you assure and constantly stress your committment, their fear persists and in the end you give up on it - or should you ? If you do then aren't you in effect making sure the fear of your loved ones is realised? And if you don't what do you do ? In a fix now aren't we ?

I can't talk about each and every single individual but can surely tell you that if its a promise that I make then its one I am going to keep, come what may. A promise that can be broken with a change in you is not worth making in the first place but if you are sure that no force of nature or reason can budge you from the committment you made to your loved ones, your friends, your love then there should be no reason for the one you made that promse to ever feel insecure and I guess this is a message I'd like to convey to those who fear a loss and in the process let go off the present and the opportunity of what could have been the time of their lives. Live the moment and believe in your trust for the other person and if the answer from within comes that nothing would ever change between the two of you whatever life has in store for you only then would you reach a state of ecstacy and a feeling of warmth that'll kindle your soul for eternity :-)