Flight

" Kamal! I want to drive your bullet." announced Shashikala.

" Sure maa. Where do you want me to take you? Rajiv Nagar market? " replied Kamal.

"I think I wasn't clear enough. I want to drive your bullet." Shashikala's emphasis on the word 'drive' stunned her husband Kishore who was watching the 7pm news.

Shashikala Mohapatra was an aesthetic women. Calm, composed, sober. Her charismatic personality was icing on the cake. Unlike most women of her age,she was fluent in English. She had been a teacher in a primary school for more than 30 years until she retired last summer. She was a modern women. However her demand of driving a bullet seemed a little overboard. 

"Shashi you do realise that driving a bullet is no child's play" chuckled Kishore.

"And you are 61 maa. It's gonna take you ages to learn." added Kamal.

"I know my age Kamal" Shashikala continued "and I do realise that it will take me forever to learn to drive. But I don't want that to stop me from trying." Her arguments seemed reasonable to her but her family found it far fetched.

"Look maa. The bullet is a heavy vehicle. It demands a lot of muscle power. Betcha won't be able to start it. Leave driving." Kamal was genuinely concerned. Shashikala's rheumatism had troubled her for decades. But she was in no mood to stop. She kept rambling about how strong she is and that her joint pain is fine. Her ambition seemed childish for a 60 years old woman,but her eyes had the confidence Kishore had never seen before.

"The bullet is a complex vehicle. It took you a month to drive a scooty which is basically a bicycle that drinks petrol. Come on Shashi,be realistic." 

"I am being realistic Kishore. Age ain't a problem. If I put in the required efforts then I can learn to drive. All I need is a bullet and someone to teach me."

"Look if you want to learn something new, try driving a car. An extra driver in the house won't worry anyone. I can ask Kamal to teach you. He won't say no to that,will you?" Kishore questioned Kamal.

"Yeah mom that would be great." He nodded.

"But I don't want to drive for myselves. I want to do it for Shalini." Shashikala replied.

"Great and I was wondering whom did Shalini inherit naivety from."Kishore added sarcastically.

"Shalini wasn't naive Kishore. It was just unfortunate." Answered Shashikala in the defence of her daughter.

"Yes mom it was an unfortunate accident. But it happened because Shalini was a reckless biker. She was careless enough to drive straight into that truck. Fortunately she didn't suffer any severe injuries." 

"Yeah Shashi. You are a smart lady. Have second thoughts before dragging yourself into it."

"You guys talking about me." 

"Aww Shalini. You are finally off the phone" smirked Kishore. "Your maa wants to drive a bullet and is in no mood to hear me and your brother. Why don't you try?"added Kishore.

"Seriously maa! Bullet at 60?" Shalini was puzzled.

Shashi was upset. She wanted Shalini to support her. Hiding her tears she added "Shalini beta, you too drove the bullet right? Then why can't I?"

"Oh c'mon maa. I was 23 when I learnt to drive. And it was a lot different than learning how to drive a scooty. It was challenging too. And you do remember my accident, don't you?" Shalini replied.

"I do remember and that is why I want to learn." answered Shashikala.

"Aren't you afraid? Don't you fear that something bad might happen?"asked Shalini. Shashi sensed perturbation in her tone.

Shalini continued "What if in the middle of driving you see your worst nightmare and you are too afraid to confront it? What if something unexpected happens in the middle of the road and it's too late to change the situation? What if you don't make it?" Shalini started shivering. Her phone fell off her hands. The bruises on her hands were visible when she bent to pick the phone.She shut her eyes in anguish. 

"I need some fresh air." Shalini said as she left the room.

"What are you trying to do Shashi? You do realise that Shalini has"

"PTSD. I know" Shashikala started weeping."And I can't see my daughter tensed and scared and nervous all the time. I want to help her. I want to be the mother she needs right now."

"I want to help her too Shashi. But we aren't professionals." Kishore tried comforting his wife as a drop of tear rolled down his eyes.

"All she needs is seeing her parents facing her fear. She needs someone to show her that she is brave. She needs someone to make her realise that we fall only to bring ourselves up. She needs someone who will turn her fear into smile. Our daughter is a plant that has just survived a storm. All she needs is a few drops of water and warmth so that she can bloom." Shashikala's words sounded like a ray of hope to Kishore as he said "wake me up at 5 tomorrow."

2 months later Shalini saw an unusual sight from her window. Her mom was smoothly driving her bullet. She rushed outside to see her wear the same helmet she wore on the day of her accident. It was full of scratches.

Shashikala on the other hand was void of the scars both old-age and patriarchal society gave to women. She seemed empowered. Her hair fluttered like the wings of a bird that has just accomplished it's first flight. 

A new sun shone on Shalini's face as she waved back to her mother. The adrenaline that had become cold for 2 years began to flow again. She raised her hand and shouted at the top of her voice,

"It's my turn now!"

~Udaya

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Cats Rains in Borneo

The Pledge

"It is one of man's curious idiosyncrasies to create difficulties for the pleasure of resolving them."

In the remote villages of Sarawak in an effort to truncate malaria, DDT was sprayed. It's butterfly effect on the food chain however was unanticipated. The poisonous chemicals not just curbed malaria carrying mosquito population but also led to a housefly genocide.

The Turn

A dead fly, albeit poisonous, is a treat to any lizard's stomach. Biological magnification however increased the toxicity of this insecticide by 10 folds leading to lizard massacres. Much like the lizards, the cats were in no mood to resist there temptations of the devouring dead, poisonous organisms. And again the toxicity amplified and a malaria mitigating insecticide transmogrified into a cat genocide. With no cats around to play chickens fellow rats turned to merry-making. The sanitary conditions turned horrendous and a plague saw an upsurge.

The Prestige

To put an end to the rats' mischieves, United Kingdom's Royal Air Force recruited 30 cats. After a month of tireless training, 23 cats bestowed with the sole responsibility of preying mice where deployed in crates using parachutes. This mission came to be known as Operation Cat Drop.

The events of Sarawak are testimonials to catastrophic effects of human intervention in food chains. A similar attempt was made in 2015 where beavers were deployed to clean a water source. 

Footnotes : operation cat drop

Image Credits : Google Images

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The Wolf and The Sheep

A country of sheep beget a wolf

with a handful of blabbermouths yawping

" who to Condemn? "

The Wolf for being a Wolf

of streets scarred by years of negligence

that are afraid to see their own faces in the mirror, 

Or the Sheep for being a Sheep

masquerading a lion every five years

and kissing it's one true love, slumber, thereafter. 

I pity the blabbermouths for not being a part of either, 

they shout at the top of their voices to go unheard. 

Since the sheep are too busy, sleeping, 

and, the wolf too busy, being busy! 

I wrote a tiny political piece. Not intended on anyone in particular. 

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Back from the Future

Searching questions for the answers

Wikipedia defines Time Travel as the concept of movement between certain points in time, analogous to movement between different points in space by an object or a person. Now time travel is a renowned genre in fiction and philosophy. It's ability to allow a person undo his past mistakes which might end up giving people a better present makes it a widely popular concept. Come on, don't you guys ever whine about your mistakes in an exam and how had you had a time machine you would have gone back to correct the incorrect. Time travel is hypothesis and so are it's rules and paradoxes, everything on a piece of paper. So in this blog, instead of writing if time travel is practically possible, we will deal with it's limitations and overcoming those limitations. Buckle up because it is gonna be a ride beyond the space-time continuum! 

The grandfather Paradox

Most of us would have watched Back to the future where Marty travels back in time using an eccentric scientist's time machine. Well the grandfather paradox disproves Marty travelling back. The grandfather paradox is a paradox of time travel in which inconsistencies emerge through changing the past. It describes a person who travels to the past and kills his or her own grandfather before the conception of his or her father or mother, which prevents the time traveller's existence. Now before fella grandfathers leave the chat, the paradox doesn't exclusively insist on the contradiction of killing someone's grandpa. It indicates that even a slightest change in the past may result in a catastrophic present. 

Limitations of the grandfather paradox and The Bootstrap Paradox

The limitations of grandfather paradox include the existence of multiverses. But before jumping straight into multiverses, let us look into another possibility, which we call destiny. 

What if the grandfather the guy who goes back in time is not biological grandfather, but just an average Joe who works as a mechanic in a garage. The guy goes back in time, kills his grandfather, realises that he is still alive because his real grandfather abandoned his father at birth who was adopted by the guy he just killed. The guy then meets his real grandfather and they share a family moment, and that's how you make a freaking good ending! This grandfather thing is all made up, but what if a person travelling to the past was always meant to happen? Like in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaben, where Harry and Hermione travel back in time to save Sirius' soul being sucked. 

 

Let us hear the story of a guy who receives a book "How to build a time Machine" from a random guy who knocks his door. He spends years building a time machine. After 20 years of unsuccessful attempts, he finally builds a fully functional time machine. He writes all his work in a book, travels to the past, knocks his door and gives his younger self the book he has written, so that he doesn't read the wrong book and doesn't spend twenty years building a fully functional time machine. The younger self receives the book and because of lack of technology, he spends 20 years trying to build a time machine and then again he makes one, travels back in time, gives himself the book. So what we see is a loop, called casual loop. And it doesn't violate the grandfather paradox. It is as if the person was destined to receive the book from his future self so that he builds a time machine. 

But what if we ask that who gave the man the book for the first time? We cannot answer that. Because this is similar to who came first, the egg or hen! This is the Bootstrap Paradox. 

    But then if we introspect then this question is as good as what is the numerical value of the left extremum on number line. So dropping this question won't harm anyone. 

The Grandson Paradox

The above paradoxes exclaim that going to the future is theoretically possible, because going to the future won't change the past, so the present won't change. But but suppose, a person goes 50 years in the future and his grandson kills him in the future before he procreates his son in present. The person's son is thus never born and the grandson never existed. But the grandson just killed him, didn't he! Now the future won't change within a fraction of a second. This is the grandson paradox. 

So where are we getting it wrong. Now with past travel already Debatable and future travel pretty much hanging in the middle of uncertainty, where do we stand in travelling from one point in time to another. 

Back from the future

So the thing is if someday we build a time machine and go to the year 2030,then yeah, it's fine. Nothing bad happens as long as we don't get ourselves killed. But the thing is if we go to the future, then the future becomes our present and the present becomes our past. And bootstrap doesn't work in the future, because unlike the present which is destined, the future is more of a subjective kind of stuff and may differ based on differences in our present actions. So even if we go to the year 2050,there is no turning back from there! A time traveller from the past will be stuck in the future till eternity or death, whosoever comes first!

So we cannot consider time travel in our universe. But what if there exist other universes. Stay tuned to my blog as this time we travel beyond our observable universe. 

New blog on multiverses on 22nd May. 

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How Whatsapp's revised video time limit for curbing fake news spread is at the same time precarious?

To begin with, Happy Mother's Day! 

Facebook owned instant messaging app WhatsApp on 30th March, 2020, reduced it's status video limit from 30 seconds to 15 seconds. According to a tweet by WABetaInfo it is happening in India and it’s probably an initiative to reduce the traffic on the server infrastructures. Another reason, which I believe played a decisive role in this time limit update, is an urge to curb fake news spread. But there is a loophole in this update! 

The video limit is 15 seconds only for India and not for any other country. So a person residing abroad will be able to upload a 30 seconds video while his acquaintance in India will be able to see only the first 15 seconds of the video! I just realized the same when my mom and aunt uploaded the same video in their status. It was a 90 seconds long video and it took my mother 6 trimmed videos while my aunt 3! And when I saw her status, I saw the odd numbered 15 second intervals i.e., 0-15 seconds, 30-45 seconds and 60-75 seconds. When I asked her what about the rest of the status, she told she could see that, however we couldn't! 

The threat

The video my mom and aunt shared was a family video, so it isn't a big deal. But we cannot deny the fact that loss of 50% of a video is no less than hiding half the data. And fake news is not just wrong news, but also incomplete news. Suppose the video would have been "The PMO promises to provide a financial aid of Rs 7500 to all BPL card holders, daily labourers and people who do not have a house" and the video gets trimmed at "The PMO promises to provide a financial aid of Rs 7500 to all", now this is a threat because who knows what upsurge it may lead to! I learnt of this today and I believe that even if Whatsapp's update is appreciable, it is precarious at the same time too. 

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German Time Pyramid

The Time Pyramid (German: Zeitpyramide) is a work of public art by Manfred Laber under construction in Wemding, Germany.

The pyramid, begun in 1993, at the 1,200th anniversary of Wemding, will take another 1163 years to complete and is scheduled to be finished in the year 3183. As of 2020, the first 3 of its scheduled 120 concrete blocks have been placed.The plan is to install 1 block every 10 years and finish 120 installations by Wemding's 2400th Anniversary! 

The blocks are as tall as an average human being. And the entire structure would be 9 metres tall with a 15 metres broad base once completed. On completion the structure will have 4 tiers. The base tier will have 8×8 i.e., 64 blocks and will be completed by 2634. The second tier will have 6×6 blocks and will be completed by the year 2983. Similarly a 4×4 third tier will be completed by 3143 and the final layer consisting of 4 blocks will be completed by 3183.

The next concrete block will be installed in 2023,  official date hasn't been declared yet! The material of the block is not fixed and may be altered in future generations based on availability. One thing I find fascinating about this project is that once completed it would be the living (I mean dead but metaphorically living) evidence of evolution of petrology, geology, metallurgy and culture over a millenium and what would make it a better evidence than the one's we have now like the Colosseum is it's dynamic nature. 

Footnotes and Image Credits : wikipedia. 

And a special thanks to Vsauce for making such amazing content. 

Extinction of the Australian Megafauna

 

 

   2.5 million years after the evolution of genus homo, we valiantly stand as members of the most cognitively developed species. We have transversed undulated topographies, have made a huge leap of not just faith but scientific limitations, equally evolving culturally from a half naked ape to a tuxedo wearing statesman. Climate change today is a hot topic. We have documentaries, magazines, interviews, press conferences and debates on how modern human is killing the environment. And guess what, it's actually true! But it's equally true that earth's climate has been in a constant flux since time immemorial. During the last million years, there has been an Ice Age on average every 100,000 years. The last one ran from 75000 years ago to 15000 years ago. And a lot of flora and fauna got extinct. But hiding behind the shadow of climate change doesn't deny that humans were equally responsible for extinction of creatures not just 300 years but also 30000 years ago.

Extinction of the Australian Megafauna

      When humans first landed on Australia they were greeted by the stangest creatures of the planet. We may not call them strange today but to an ancient man who landed on a stranded island 40000 years before google Maps, would share the same eerie expression on his face as you would if you see iron man flying over your head. These alien creatures were our very own 200kg 2 meters tall kangaroos, and a marsupial lion, as massive as a modern tiger, and guess what it ruled the jungle back then as well.
      

      The koalas were far too big to be cuddly, the lizards were more of a dragon and snakes were as long as five meters. The giant diprotodons , 2 and a half tonne wombats, roamed the forests. To a modern day man, the scenery might seem scary but our ancient hero had to push his limits to survive in a new environment. 

     Within a few thousand years, virtually all of these giants vanished. Of the twenty four Australian animal species weighing 50 kilograms or more, twenty-three became extinct. Smaller species disappeared in large numbers too. Food chains throughout the entire Australian ecosystem were broken and rearranged. The giant diprotodons that appered more than 1.5 million years ago, after surviving 10 ice ages and the peak of the last ice age (70000 years ago) disappeared around that time too. More than 90% of Australia's megafauna disappeared along with the diprotodon.

    While climate change may be considered a reason behind this large scale ecological damage, we cannot unsee that climate change equally affects aquatic species. Yet there has been no significant disappearance of oceanic fauna 45000 years ago! Researchers claim that one of the prime reasons behind the extinction of Australian megafauna is that the species, unlike species in Africa which evolved along with sapiens, were completely untouched by human intervention. They couldn't adapt to a new species in a food chain, and thus fell out of the race of the survival of the fittest.

If our Ancestors were ecological serial killers too, then why brag about animal extinction now?

Well because our ancestors didn't realize what they were doing. They can't be attributed wrong because their acts eventually led us to where we stand today. Imagine an environmental activist goes back in time to stop sapiens from killing a mammoth, our present won't remain the same, and it would definitely be a lot different than seeing mammoths in zoos and national parks. And we need to brag about animal extinction today because humans can't make the whole food chain. Now that we realise the value of ecological balance and the downsides of ecological imbalance it becomes our primal duty of conserving it.

Footnotes
1. Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari;
2. The Future Eaters: An Ecological History of the Australian Lands and People's, Timothy F. Flannery;
3. A Review of Evidence for a Human Role in the Extinction of Australian Megafauna and an Alternative Explanation, Stepen Wroe and Judith Field.

Image credits
1. Google, Wikipedia. 

For more, see wiki article on Australian Megafauna. 

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