Hum-Tum

Well, Thanks a lot for for all my readers for the overwhelming response & appreciation of my previous post ‘A never ending story’. Probably this one is similar to that.

I ran across this beautiful* girl in park & this is our story. How often do you meet a stranger with whom you really connect on an intellectual & emotional level?

*beauty lies in the eyes of the beholder! 
*she must be beautiful of course ! 

            I am hum, She is tum, just simply for no apparent reason at all!

On weekends I usually take a walk or jog, that's the most I can do my my health's sake. So, as I was walking in the park, there was this girl who got scared by dog barking outside the park, as she held my hand suddenly.

hum : hey relax it’s outside the park fence

tum : ya I know, but that scared the hell out of me.

Hum: too afraid of dogs haan ?

Tum: ya, sorry …(probably she meant sorry for holding my hands)

Hum: if it makes you feel any better, I have a friend of mine, colleague, she is scared of anything & everything. whatever phobias they have named, I seriously think she has almost all of them. LOL !

Tum: Really ? Well I consider myself lucky in that case then, I am afraid of dogs & heights & wait cockroaches.

Hum: hann me too, I am afraid of cockroaches too & still call mom when I see one!

Tum : come on, still ?

Why don’t we take a walk while we talk?

Tum: Sure, its good day isn’t it? Not very hot not very cold.

Hum: ya absolutely, you don’t have to worry about dressing put on your raincoats or sweater etc.

Tum: you lecturer by any chance ?

Hum: No, I am a software engineer by destiny & amateur astronomer by choice. By why did you feel that I am lecturer.

Tum: Well you had that professor type ka look you know.

Hum: Oh really, I have been told this a couple of times by friends & don’t like it much as I appear a bit older than I am actually.

Tum: no you don’t, you look like 26 or something.

Hum: ya see I am 25 & you said 26.

Tum: come on, one year older, I am not you psychic to guess your age correctly.

Hum: anyway, What to you do for living ?

Tum: Strange question isn’t it ? What you do for living. Living happily requires nothing actually it’s the society which has created a financial stuff & all where you need to do some work to earn to feed your stomach etc etc

Hum: hmmm Ya correct. Most of the things which give real pleasure should be for free. It’s our right after being born here.

Tum: well, I am studying apparel designing, intend to take up the same as profession.

Hum: apparel ?

Tum: oh sorry, I should explain, fashion designing u know.

Hum: oh right ! Great you are doing something which you really love. Most of the people land up in wrong professions & end up cribbing that why didn’t they dare one time when they had a chance. they were like at point where crossroads meet & they has to choose a path they walk on one of the roads life’s obligations you know, & have a plan that they can return after a while & when they are bit further they think let me walk a little more & then I can return & they keep walking & they come to a point where they cannot afford to return anyway. & just have to keep walking the path. Sorry I tend to go philosophical sometimes. 

Tum: Hmm, I like philosophy, 
Hum:great, So you like me :-)
Tum: What  ? what did you just say ? 
Hum: nothing, you were telling something ? 
Tum: i heard that , tell me..
Hum: there was this joke i used to make when we learnt associative law in high school if A equals B & B equals C, then A equals C. As u like philosophy , So you like me ! sorry bad joke ! 
Tum: Good that you admitted. you seem like Chandler type. Ya really bad joke ,Anyway well did you intend to be software engineer ?
Hum: Honestly I didn’t knew what software engineering was all about, until I actually was working in it. I am interested in astronomy & wanted to take that up, but finances, financial obligations at home, foreign education too many aspects to consider about & landed up here. leave it its long story anyway.

Tum: see my guess was right? Professor type ka ? Astronomy is tough subject stars galaxies evolution of universe ! 

Hum: thanks God, i was just fearing that i need to correct, as most of the people assume astronomy is astrology & ask to read their palms or tell their future. Not really, although true to some extent, we run a club called BAS- Bangalore Astronomical Society. Hey you know what, i was told i am not supposed to brag about astronomy stuff in front of pretty girl. & I really don't like to blah blah about myself, why don't we talk something interesting.

Tum: hey are you trying to flirt with me, pretty & all ? 
Hum: Ya flirting, but i just said what my heart told me :-) alright if you don't wanna be called beautiful :-) jus kidding 
Tum: enough of this senti filmy drama, i am my mom-dad-certified beautiful girl. Hmm, Something which lies in intersection of both interests? well, i can guess you give a damn about clothing etc. fashion stuff etc etc. So lets see i like to read books & blog.

Hum: how the hell you guess that just from my looks, this is the best jogging dress i have. infact the only one i have.

Tum: that's why i guess !

Hum: oh, come on it is good, bachelors really don't care about such things. But have seen the movie The devil wears prada. I loved the movie.

Tum: you must have fallen for Anna the actress in the movie.

Hum: how the hell, u can read my mind. ya she is sexy, but the movie as such is good, its something similar to you, Anna finally goes into profession she loves. So i guess your work is backstage, all the hard work that goes when we enjoy the models on screes on FTV or something.

Tum: ya somewhat, still i am studying, so need to explore the various aspects in this field. I really feel weird about having heavy stuff as astronomy as hobby.   
Hum: Why not, serious science can also be fun, & it depends on individual what he/she enjoys doing in spare time. What are you hobbies? 
Tum : Hmm lets seem, hey i know it may sound silly, i really like to watch tv, everybody says that's hobby, but on the funnier side i really get lost doing that....just lazily watch tv whole day long. I read good books & blah blah about daily life & moments which really feel good instead of keeping  a private journal, i blog.

Hum: thats nice, i also belong to blogosphere. You may not realize the importance of creative hobby if you have something creative to do in your profession, that way you can never get bored as you have always something to invent newly, if if you get good appreciations. 

Tum: Hmmm yaa, never thought about it so seriously ...feels good, thanks for the insight. creativity just relaxes the mind. 

Hum: you must be good at drawing, imagining something & just putting it exactly on paper. i am bad at drawing, Once i drew a girl with short skirts in drawing exam, but she was a kind of sexy :-) 
Tum: really ? i know what you boys think all the time, whatever you think most will come in your actions. i dont blame you for that. 
Hum: hey come on, Don't generalize all boys are not typical. 
Tum: hey it was nice chatting with you, i am supposed to have breakfast with my roomate now i need to go ? 
Hum: Hey , sorry but can we have breakfast , of you can tell something to your roomate. 
Tum : Ahh you are already asking me out ? 
Hum : well, we are technically out, So not asking you out but just asking your permission to roam around with you outside :-) 
Tum: But what to tell, she just identifies that i am lying
Hum :why Lie, tel you met a handsome boy & hanging out with him,
Tum : Oho So you wanna hear your appreciation from me haan ? 
Hum : jus kidding, tell her that you would hang out today entrire day with a wonderful stranger you met at park. 
Tum: No No, not entire day, just breakfast. 
Hum :ok Fine


So Hum Tum meet the next day. both had nice time talking  were sort of desperate to meet each other. 


Tum : hey different jogging dress ? you lied that you had only one. 
Hum : come on i dont care about such things, if i had worn same, you would have asked same, would be critisized in both ways !  


Hum : you look good, fits correctly. 
Tum: Seriously stop flirting 
Hum :relax, i was just , hey by the way, Did you read Chetan bhagat's new book 2 states which has come out 
Tum : no i heard that its not that good, Five point someone was good. 
 Hum: i never read that also, but i am sure now you wanna tell the stoy to me now. 
Tum :  i like story telling, mom & dad used to tell me lots of them to make me go to sleep.   
 Hum: my mom used to tell many many times story of ant which met my dad when my dad was on his way back from work. its so long since i remembered this stuff.
Tum : well, ya somethings are deep inside our mind, we never recollect even thought they are just always there , thoughts & feelings may be childhood schooldays etc.  well, 5 point someone is a story about 3 IITian friends who find pleasure n all the wrong things, they get low percentage, but enjoy their life. 
Hum: nice one, no need to read it now, thanks for saving my time.
Tum :Dude you must take time to do things which are not heavy on your mind, not your astronomy stuff. but i wanna hear more. 
Hum :   

      

to be continued.....

Sci-Fi Cafe

I have seen a lot & lot of science fiction movies, here is my personal top recommendation.

This article is like coffee table magazine, just for random reading.

I'll enrich the contents as & when time permits....comments most welcome please.

1) The Time Machine - Nothing beats the HG wells classic thriller! - A scientist's lady love dies & he wanders in time to find answers to regain his love! The motivation for him to build time machine is just a deep aspiration to meet his lady love just one more time. So constructs a time machine, goes in past & meets her, but she dies anyway owing to the concept or reality that events in the past or rather destiny cannot be changed. He goes to future to find the answers & sort of gets lost in time becomes a wanderer in time! Heart touching scene, moon is shown as fragmented stretching across the sky much like the milky way , amazing scenery & of course the time machine & time dial on it ! Probably this gave first visual picture of a concept as abstract & absurd as a time machine. Good conceptualization &

2) The man from the earth – You will get lost in logical arguments, it's just a simple movie, bunch of professors expert in their own domains, sitting on a couch & chatting, simply mind blowing arguments about religion, philosophy, fiction, beliefs of civilizations, prehistoric man & his numerous beliefs, assumption about God etc, catch up detailed review posted previously on my blog.

3) The Matrix - Totally out of box. Free your mind ! as the punchline tells no body can be told what the matrix is , you have to see it for yourself, well I coudnlt believe that science fiction movie can go to this level of complexity, many concepts beome clear whn you see it for 2^nd & third time.AI-artificial intelligence

4) Deep impact - Begins with an high school kid, an Amateur Astronomer spotting an unknown object around star Mizar, its a double star which appears single to eye, but thru binocs or telescope it splits as two. That unknown object is an Asteroid on it's path to collide with earth.

5) Armageddon - I feel it is quite a senti movie, just love the song ‘Don’t wanna miss a thing' ! Planting a nuke in core of Asteroid supposed to hit earth is really a very scientific idea, totally practical when we are faced with such a scenario.

6) Minority Report - Amazingly advanced technology ideas !

7) Hitchhiker's guide to galaxy - excellent novel read "The ultimate hitchhikers guide to galaxy”

8) Pi - A psycho tries to find pattern in stock market. Everything in nature has patterns. Nature loves symmetry & patterns.

9) Pitch black - Good thriller, The moon or planets on the alien planet are superb !

10) The Abyss - Discover what is there in bottom of ocean ! A crew just happens to make an amazing discovery of finding intelligent life forms at the bottom of ocean.

11) Blade runner - Classic

12) Eternal sunshine of spotless mind- Erasing memories? How about that? Two people erase their memories to forget about each other, but their love in the deepest of their memories finds a way to recall good things & reunite them. The deep emotions of love cannot be erased !

13) The Contact – Good movie containing many concepts like Radio astronomy, Time travel, Einstein-Rosen bridge. Alien intelligence etc. But really feels like it's over doing in last hour or so.

Up up & away!

Up is a very nice, soft, gentle romantic comedy, heart touching story of a couple Carl & Ellie, It’s a sweet story which tells how far a husband can go to keep the promise made to his beloved wife, the promise has relevance & meaning even when she is long gone, a promise made a to a childhood sweetheart fulfilled at old age. I learnt what fatherhood meant after watching ‘Life is beautiful’, in which a father sacrifices his life to save his son’s. Probably this redefines my assumption of what a husband & home means & the way he cares for his wife’s feelings & that he can not only go an extra mile every time but fly thousands of miles to keep a promise made long ago which perhaps may even be forgotten. A small kid has a dream more of a fantasy to become an explorer, go to the undiscovered land where no human has ever gone, see & learn new things sort of obsession. He runs into a like minded girl who welcomes him in her explorer club, well only two members in their club Carl & Ellie. They are simply so adorable with their helmets & circular goggles etc. They fall in love & get married & then life becomes full of mundane routine activities, Carl being a balloon man makes a happy living, but not enough to afford an adventure trip to South America, that was the time when that land was an undiscovered one. They pool in money to go to their adventure camp several times, but that gets spent in times of crisis, they kind of let go of their long cherished explorer dream, well not really let it go for ever. Ellie tells Carl to cross his heart whenever she speaks of the adventure trip she wants to experience paradise falls in South America, an unexplored land in wilderness the photo of which she ripped from library book. Well I don’t know what Ellie really meant by crossing heart but understood Carl’s version of the same when he does keep up the promise of having their house on paradise falls, by making an attempt, flying a thousand miles into the unknown in his house tied with 50,000 helium balloons, reminded me of promise by Forrest Gump who tells, “A promise is a promise lieutenant Diane”, a promise made to beloved, fulfilled no matter what it takes no matter how far you need to go….

It’s so good to see everyday when you clean a windows glass from one side & you see your wife cleaning from the other. But from some day when you don’t get to see her on the other side of window you realize that how much you miss her & life becomes really dull! Ellie leaves Carl behind, who in his old age tries to fulfill her dream of having their house on top of paradise falls, a land undiscovered in South America. So, he flies in his house with 50,000 helium filled balloons enough to lift his house & fly. He is accompanied by naughty kid Russell who shares the same dream of becoming an explorer. They encounter numerous problems on their way & finally house finds its way on top of paradise falls just as Ellie painted & aspired. It’s really wonderful to know when Carl goes through the picture book of Ellie, expecting it to be blank as they never made to paradise falls when she was alive as it was supposed to contain the adventures of paradise falls, instead it contained photos of their marriage, & life thereafter, time spent along with each other etc. Life with Carl was an adventure for Ellie indeed.

It’s really amazing how they fill the expressions & emotions in animation. You will instantly fall in love with the characters in the movie which are almost like teddy bears. Altogether a must watch.

Nostalgic feelings of a time traveller

Stories of time traveler part-1
I have loved & fantasized about the concept of time machine, the philosophical part of & the theoretical astrophysics part of it, seen it in several films & hence a kind of obsession. I was just wondering if I get a chance to time travel, how wonderful would that be. Probably I can go back to my high school days; they were probably the best days of my life, not very best to associate myself singing the ‘summer of 69’ for those memories, but they were worth a good recollect & enjoy feeling nostalgic about them. I would time travel back to my class & look at myself when I was an 18yrs old kid. So I continued imagining. A series of thoughts ran across my mind. The first period was Maths & Kulkarni started to explain factorization. Well there was nothing much exciting about it as myself along with few more others in class would have learnt the same in his tuition class few days earlier itself. I did not hate or dislike maths but just believed that unless you are a genius you cannot achieve anything great in it as it’s quite tough. That’s why I instantly appreciated Charles Herman’s (John Nash imaginary roommate) dialogue in the movie A beautiful mind which goes “Mathematics is never gonna lead you to higher truth, because it’s boring”. Sometimes the understanding would go void like division by zero is not defined. I wondered if there are any researches going on that understanding? On that day, I had factorized it so much some a2(a2+b2) equation that I went ahead un-factoring it & arriving at the question itself & wondering what was going on ? Accidentally I had scored 25 out of 25 in 1st test & kind of needed to maintain my reputation or impression n class, oh come on whom am I kidding? It was all for maintaining impression for girls; I took extra interest in learning things. I had heard that beauty & brains would not go together & I was happy with the thought that a beautiful girl would be interested in me. What to do with herself being intelligent anyway? There was this girl Neeta whom I used to ask doubts. She was too brilliant in maths that I often wanted to tell her that she must seriously think of going for higher education in some good university abroad. I never told her this I suppose. Some times we fail to tell things which we regret later in life. Then the science teacher walks in. she is kind of reading the science book & explaining things, not that interesting though. But the contents were my favorite as it was astronomy. It was more of astronomy fact book than a book intended to arouse curiosity & excitement in young student’s mind about the mysteries of universe. But since I loved astronomy from I don know like from second standard or something so I loved it anyway. That was the time when Pluto enjoyed its status as a planet; I feel pity for Pluto now. Lot of things have changed about mankind’s understanding & hence perception of universe since then, We have Hubble’s telescope encircling the earth & doing pretty good job taking very nice pics of deep sky objects which were never seen with best telescopes on earth, thus confirming the fact that galaxies are moving from each other, in other words our universe is expanding. Now we have observational evidence backed with statistical data to confirm the big bang theory which tells that our universe was created in big bang & since the bang galaxies are moving away from each other, also farther the distance between them the faster they are moving apart. I learnt more astronomy reading articles in newspapers than the science text book.
I was always a last bencher & wondered whether it was just owing to height, but still managed to get a pretty decent rank. I have always loved the last benches, because the probability of getting Line of Sight eye contact with teacher is less & you can be in your world exploring the humorous aspect of the things taught in class. the front seats are for the intelligent kids who are too ambitious & have clear goals in mind of what they wanna do in their lives, but as I have observed they end up doing quite the opposite of it. I had couple of friends telling that would join Army or navy & couple of them telling they would be astronauts. All of such kids have ended up in Infosys, TCS, and Wipro nowadays. The back benches are holy they are for the intellectual people like us who like to have their space & time to interpret things in their own way. Well in engineering classes the competition for getting back benches is more as suddenly the number of intellectuals tends to increase apart from the fact to avoid being asked for submission of assignments.
Then was the games period, the much awaited one, like the Vardan given by god after getting impressed for the morning prayers for so many years. Sir asked to count randomly 1 & 2 & made 2 teams to play football. After a while I forgot who my teammates were & after a while I forgot where my goalpost was. Probably I think others had forgotten as well, as everyone seemed to be running behind the ball. So I followed the rest, ran fast behind the ball wherever it went just trying to grab an opportunity to kick it & this was fun !!
Then as usual we went late to the moral science class as the sir would not scold about that. The subject was considered passé even then. He told some story centered around the concept of hope & at quoted at the end “We should have hopeful hope not hopeless hope” which was more practical as we can hope for things we can really achieve I life. Neither the school nor the students give much importance to moral science. I now believe that this should be given importance as these lessons make us more human. Make us realize what we want out of life, identify ourselves & our place in society which are very important to lead a good & happy life. Then we had the social science history class, we put the “F” word to right use the first time “Who the fuck cares when the battle of Plassey was fought or arrange bunch of such nonsense happenings in chronological order”. I seriously believed that we should not mug up things which we can always look up in book. Come on what is the purpose if preserving books for then? If we feel the need to throw away the book then we no longer need the things contained in the book.
The hindi class was always good as hindi teacher would read a line in the book & go on telling some interesting story & at the end of class she would always tell “dekho mein kahan se kahan pahoonch gaye” we all used to reply Kahin nahi pahoonche madam, bas chapter ke pehle line mein he hai ! & then there were tests & marks comparision. This was the time india was blessed with evergreen bollyhood hits like DDLJ & KKHH & DPT & it was good to imagine ourselves as hero & fall in love with beautiful girl in class.
I took a deep breadth & realized I don’t wanna return to present life’s mindset which is more of a routine & responsibilities etc. There is not much fun & we cannot do childish things anymore. ....