May it Be

It's the month of May, nothing else with the title. May is named after the Greek goddess Maia, the eldest of the Pleiades and the goddess of fields and fertility. As usual, Greek mythology is intimately connected with astronomy. Pleiades is a beautiful and probably the brightest open star cluster visible in the night sky. Maia is the brightest. The beauty of Pleiades also lies in some of the detailed features such as a Reflection Nebula, which is a cloud of dust appearing bright thanks to reflection of light from nearby bright stars. Edwin Hubble gave a simple formula that relates the angular size of the reflection nebula to the Apparent magnitude of the nearby star. The hi-res image of the reflection nebula was my wallpaper for quite some time.

This month has been moderately eventful. My results have not been something I can particularly write about, it's always better to pretend contentment and avoid cribs. I've been doing a lot of browsing, it has become my favourite pastime. My Schedule has been quite awkward, but I suppose I have been upto some creative work. I have also got in touch with many of my old classmates. It gives this goody feeling. Another good event is that I just finished watching Ghost in the Shell : StandAlone Complex and I'm quite impressed with the overall storyline, but not much with the individual episodes. The character/concept of The Laughing Man is just beautiful. The 2nd series, 2nd Gig, is better. Even better, I suppose are the movies, Ghost in the Shell and Ghost in the Shell 2 : Inocence. I was impressed by practically everything in the movies, the animation(the blending of CGI into the cel animation), the story, the quotes & references, the background music, subtleties in the plot, the list goes on. The only drawback I can say is the accentuated anatomy(to be euphemistic), which can be understood by the fact that the creator of the original Manga, Masamune Shirow is also a hentai artist.
I have been enjoying my extended stay in Madras, I suppose not many people miss me. It is great to live in neglect. Loneliness has its unique beauty(and I'm not a Narcissist - this is especially for POTA, if you're reading this post). I'm now looking forward to another month of joblessness, random thoughts and then the inevitable and all-important home visit. Which reminds me, I can't yet see my home in GoogleMaps, but I got this good a view. The black square is roughly where my house is.
The green patch near it is a ground adjacent to our street.

Happy Birthday to Me

I turned 19 four days ago, and I did escape without Birthday bumps(in other words, none had the enthusiasm to give me bumps).

After turning 19, I frankly have to say, I'm still a kid. I have learnt but a miniscule fraction of a drop in the mighty ocean.

My sincerest thanks to many many people for not killing me for my PJs which are getting ever so worse daily. Your cooperation in this regard was inevitably necessary for my survival in my 19th lap around the sun. Thanks also to the many who actually think I'm normal and support my views(the rest of the world may pity you, but you are seriously broadminded).
Finally, thanks to all who have wasted their precious time in reading this post and losing moments of their vanishing youth.

Previous Records

This is what was referred to by a person whose initials are inscribed in the minds of every Mech and Elec student.
The scene - F slot class, papers being distributed. I was nervous after hearing that LHS(Ayush), one of the most innocent people I know here, was given a zero over suspicion of copying. That's nerve. I am on my way to collect the paper and I accidentally(or was it an omen?) bump into the guy before me. I'm given my paper. And there's a pull from the other side when I'm taking my paper. I see my paper and to my horror, I see a petite '0' on the paper, for the first time in my life I'm seeing a zero not preceded by any other digit on a paper I've attempted.
I know precisely why the suspicion arose and why this was done. I simply didn't write ANY formulae on my paper. That was a serious backfire. I'm quite used to this way of answering. I had to go and ask for marks. What reason could I give? That I don't write formulae? Will any sensible person believe that? And what can I even tell him? Beats me.
I went and asked him for whatever I deserved, I was told :' I'm not convinced by any of your reasoning, or by a sad face that you can make. I checked your previous records, and just for that I give you marks for whatever you have written. Don't repeat this'.
Phew! No words left to say. All said and done(!) there's some places you may be remebered for something you have done, it may be in the most unexpected of circumstances, like this. More lessons learnt - what you write matters. No more papers without formulae for me again.

Reflecting on Shaastra - Good Heavens!

Ok let me make one thing clear - a pun is intended on the title 'Good Heavens', which you may understand later. Writing on my experiences at Shaastra 2005 will take long. Shaastra 2004 was the start to it all. I will have to confine it to the event I volunteered for, and in 2005, was coordinator for.

My experiences at Astronomy Workshop Shaastra 2004 were strange. I was working under good old Loki, who inspired me quite a lot to participate in Literary activities. I got to know 2 amazing people - Ganesh and Aswin. Work was tedious with a lot of posters to make, 10 hours a day on computer, searching images and putting them on posters, making the template and what not. It was fun with Loki preparing for GRE right beside me. Then there was the putting up of IPs, xeroxing of the star maps - which could have been assigned to volunteers for IP and production (my thanks to all the other vols). The system is quite organized with work very well distributed. But sometimes things were very bad because of lack of manpower. Then when the event came, came the registration thing. 2 of us had to sit at the Hospitality giving the registrants star maps which were their tickets to the event. Along with that there was a problem with the title of a lecture in the schedule, which had to be changed by hand in hundreds of these sheets. The lectures arranged were excellent. Then it was food coupons being spent in the evening for dinner and off we go to terrace to set up the telescopes and stuff.
I should say, the one thing that spoiled all was that the skies were very cruel to us. Clouds everywhere making even the brightest of stars almost inivisible. Till around 30 deg altitude the sky was a shady red soil colour. Thanks to TIDEL park, there was a lot of background lighting. To add to all the trouble there was uncontrollable crowd trouble. We had to show them TIDEL park for showing them how to use a telescope... Well, all said and done, it was an experience never to forget.

Sem2 : Shaastra coord interviews in March. I don't know why I went for it. Still can't figure out why I took a lot of responsibility when I'm seriously bad at handling this. Anyways, I got selected and work began soon for Shaastra 2005. This time we had a lot of stuff done on the web including a pre- registration. That was supposed to make it all the more better(?). IPs and all software material was made well in advance. We got some videos to show the participants so as to keep them entertained if the sky were to be like 2004. I learned a lot from 2004. My extra thanks to the coordinators Loki, Debo and Devilal. The next issue was getting telescopes and lectures. Thanks be to my co-coord Prasad aka Rapdas, a lecture was arranged. Disappointingly we couldn't make that as good as 2004, but one professor who couldn't come that time came for a lecture this time for World Year of Physics and that got us lucky. I had to make a string of visits and calls to get telescopes from Birla planetarium. But in the end we got some very impressive stuff from them. But to get this, it was quite difficult as things were going wrong in the last minute. Lack of understanding among coords was taking its toll. We finally got that done too. Furthermore there was a problem of arranging a place to store these. Only a small enclosure was available and that did suffice.
Coming to the event days, the professor who was to deliver the lecture arrived on day1. A very nice person, who has a lot of u.s accent because of ~20 yrs there. Things beginning to work. But... Rapdas was writing GRE on exactly that day. Man was Murphy right! To add to the trouble there was a seriously killer problem. The event which was to begin at 11 was put in as 9 in the schedules. What bigger problem do you need. There was another registration problem, people expected the same as 2004. So we had to reintroduce that. People throng the terrace at 9, we are just getting started. What a shock it was for us! And then because of people thronging the hospitality desk, the hospitality head is totally pissed off(obviously). He comes atop and says - Astronomy Workshop Pack! and all Hindi abuses. I was beginning to count stars - pun again! It was a long quarrel with the core group that settled it. It was 4 mad men shouting at each other(incl me!). It was an effort to get it right. The telescopes arrived on time. We set all the equipment up including a computer and LCD projector (which initially was not sanctioned for us - so we had to put an effort there too). The vols were given the work of handling the scopes/binoculars during the session and 1 guy for the registration thing.

t = 11 pm, 06 Oct 2005. We have people coming in. Everyone up and going.
THE SKY IS CLEAR - GOOD HEAVENS! And so we started and it went very well. Participants were amazed at the software demonstrations we gave them. Many thanka to the vols, observations also went well. Ganesh and I were shouting the basic instructions, like
"There's 3 stars there, you can't see the 3rd" , "The big triangle right above your head" , "The blurred patch is a cluster" and what not...







Photo shows a vol and myself pointing at Cassiopeia






Aswin unfortunately couldn't be there for the event. We missed him a lot. Telescopes incl the huge Celestron reflector were excellent and people enjoyed working with them. The summer triangle was very dominant in the Western horizon. And of course we had Mars and Orion nebula, Andromeda galaxy and too many binary/double stars to show them.
Day2 and 3 went like it were pre-programmed. And the timing problem was almost clarified by huge IPs showing the timings. It was one heck of an October.





Photo shows almost the whole group of Astronomy Workshop 2005.
Me 3rd from left.

So much for the 4 continuous night outs and no more than 2 hrs of sleep per day. These days gave me a lot to write about, too much to remember. It's difficult to say whether time will wear this experience off me. Hope to keep the enthusiasm going. Cooperation kept everything going. Let me keep that in my mind, as the rig veda said:

Sam Gachhadhwam, Sam Vadadhwam, Sam Vo ManAmsi JAnatAm

Assemble, exchange ideas, know your minds together.

My December

Sort of escapes me why I give such shady names to my posts. Stereotypical nevertheless, for some people. The title is self explanatory.

This is one of my biggest problems, I often write so much that an introduction will take the space of a whole article. This time I'm glad it didn't go a hundredth as much. Precision and accuracy are key to an engineer's way of working, though we see that approximation to a certain practical extent makes up the modus operandi when approached with a problem. I give in to the scientist in me for some reasons may have to ask God to understand, sometimes.

Anyway it is some kind of weird month as was expected, December. Almost nothing to do, a lot of introversion, more sleep, more food, fattening and what not. Got nearly bored to death. I was kind of jobless, but for a few things. Weekends got wasted and I think it's been real bad of me not even giving notice to my old teachers that I was in town. Things keep bugging me at times. It was a dramatic turn of events at home, lots of drama on the phone, I was getting pained by some of the stupid things we were speaking about.
One of the nicest things I did was visit a really, really good friend and spend a day with him. True friends will never seem to cause any problem or even a hint of it, they will pull you from ones.
I pity the person who reads this, if ever there be one.

Is Spring far behind?

Machine Drawing - An Epsiode to Forget

Well, this is the story of my ordeal with Machine Drawing, one of the two courses I liked in the 3rd semester. I started off very well and I knew the concepts extremely well. I just loved the subject. But the way people took it changed my opinion about Mech in IITM. People bunked a lot of classes in the beginning and towards the end, they just started dweling in the CAD lab! They spent all their days there finishing their backlog and then doing something extra and that too in some very bad fashion which changed the impression of the professor who taught us. Man, these people just don't sport it! furthermore, after knowing everything and being quick and efficient in the software, I still managed to screw up everything by making the worst careless mistakes I've ever come across in my life!
This could be my worst ever score in a test on 50. I already made a landmark dark spot of 5.5/20 which hit me like the asteroid which wiped out the dinosaurs, leaving a gaping hole in my mind. I should try and get rid of this carelessness which was dominant before JEE, dormant during it and back with double the intensity after it.
Another thing that saddens me is that I've missed the 2nd wedding in a row this year. My absence was felt. I felt left alone and too much open to the subtle changes chance brings to me. My studies shouldn't go anywhere but up. And that's a long way to go starting with my carelessness that is sky high.
I believe that I can make it some time and that I will. There is a force inside me that keeps me going even in the worst of situautions and it has to grow. Faith and hope can lead me when coupled favourably with immense amount of hard work. I'd rather highlight that the work you have to put in does sometimes exceed very well, the goal you have to reach.

'Na me mrtyushanka Na me jaatinbhedah
Pita naiva me naiva maata na janma
Na bandhur na mitram gurur naiva shishyah
Chidaanandaroopah Shivoham shivoham'

I have no death or fear, I have no distinction by class or caste,
I have no father, or mother, or birth,
No friend, no kith or kin, no teacher or disciple,
I am the embodiment of knowledge and bliss-
I am Shiva, I am Shiva

From Nirvanashatkam of Sankaracharya.

What is Arabian Marasmus?

I am Mahesh Mahadevan, have finally created my blog!
For those who didn't understand what Arabian Marasmus is, it's just an anagram of my traditional Brahmin name.
I don't think anyone is interested about that.
Let me hope I can continue to blog.