Home! Blue Home!

Years ago when I was in Middle school there was a chapter on Moon Landing in our English (my second language) text book. The chapter had two pictures. First one was of Armstrong standing on the moon surface and the second one the famous "Earth rising" over moon's horizon. I have been fascinated by that picture since then and you can see why.


I found this video from one of the Appolo missions. I think this is taken from Lunar orbiter coming from the "other" side of the moon.

Recently I also found this awesome video taken by Mercury Messenger mission. This is so neat that I thought this must be animation of some sort. But I confirmed this with the movies section of the mission website that is indeed a mission video.


I found this Picture in a post from one of the blogs I always enjoy reading. This is supposed to be the farthest picture taken of earth. This picture of "pale blue dot" is taken by Voyager 1 spacecraft from 4 billion miles away.

Cutest story ever told

Its that time of the year here in US when the Indians around you start talking about their up-coming trip to India. One of the things that made my trip to India last year memorable was the time I spent with my two little cousins Pooja and Anu. They are 10 and 7 respectively. When I came to US, I missed them more than anyone. I didn't miss my parents or my own siblings much as I grew up outside the family and got back home the year Pooja was born and stayed home till coming here.

When I was there, on one of those days, just before they were going to sleep, they asked me to tell them a story. So I started on a story for which Pooja said she already knew that and she continued the story. Once she has finished the story, her little sister Anu, wanting not to be left alone said she also knows many such stories. I asked her to tell me one. What followed is the cutest story I have ever heard. I don't know if anyone not knowing Kannada would get this. But, I have tried to translate this to English and hope not much is lost in the translation.

Anu : Ondu uuralli obba Raja idda. Avanige thumba vaysagitthu. [Pause]...Aag ondu ajji bandlu noodu...

[Translation - Once upon a time there was a King. He was very old. [Pause, and in a highly dramatic tone]... Then,all of a sudden,there comes a old witchy woman and...]

As she was finishing her third sentence I was laughing out loud and literally rolling on the floor. She is so cute and unpretentious. I still remember her innocent face as she was watching me hysterically laughing. Don't moments like these make you cringe when you think she is going to be a year older when you see her next time?

Style Matters

I have started noticing how naturally stylish and graceful some people are in real life. I think it started when I was home earlier this year and my brother was driving me around in our brand new car. I just started comparing the way I drive and how he drives. He drives that manual transmission car so smooth in those Indian roads and he looks so natural as if they built the car just for him. The way I drive,well, there is nothing smooth about it to say the least. He is also very stylish in how he dresses, how he carries himself in general and oh! yeah, the girls he likes. How come I don't do anything with any style?

I think some people are born that way, like Mark Waugh of Australia, for example. He looked graceful even when (very very rarely) he dropped a easy catch standing in slips.

I have one such friend too whom I know for a long time. I have known him since I was 8 or 9 years old. We were classmates at some point and buddies in college later on. Over the years we have played lots of Cricket, Soccer, Snooker and spent lot of time in and around college campus. He is very stylish and graceful in whatever he does. He was and still is one of the most elegant Cricket players I ever seen. He is very stylish wherever I have seen or played together. From playing inside someone's house compound to playing on a decent Cricket pitch, he looks very stylish. Same applies to his bowling and he is an excellent fielder.

Its not just Cricket or Snooker or other things he plays, pretty much everything else he does, does it with a panache. Like the way he talks or does a wise-crack about someone. That also includes that one time when he chickened out of our trip to Bangalore to watch India Vs Pakistan Cricket match in Chinnaswamy Stadium. He was so elegant and graceful in convincing us that he will be there on the morning of the Match (even though he had already made up of his mind not to come) we came out of the packed stadium right before the match to call him up and ask what time he was showing up!. Even today he maintains he had the most severe fever one could have, although the reasons for the fever keep changing.

We spent a lot of time together at crossroads of our respective lives right after graduating out of Engineering college trying to figure out what we should do. Waiting for something (Job or Higher education or Running a Business, etc) to happen in our lives. So many people thought my life was going nowhere and future was looking bleak. You would think that those times were very uncertain and insecure. They were! But, I remember myself being most relaxed than any time I had ever been. That was partly due to his influence and how gracefully he was weighing his options in life. He was one of very few friends who stood by me without putting any peer-pressure on what I was wanting to do.

I was always curious and wanted to know about the girls he was linked with from time to time. Whenever I ask him who that is, he says as elegantly, "Which one, Ranga?, there are so MANY of them, I can't even get out of my house without being swarmed!!!".

I have met him in US couple of times in last couple of years. Life in US hasn't made him look one bit mechanical. Me on the other hand, as someone generously put it, growing up to be a prefect Homer Simpson.

Uppittu, Upma, Kharabath

Recently, I started getting severe craving for Uppitt (Uppittu, Upma and Kharabath they all mean the same thing just like India, Bharat and Hindustan!). I hadn't had that one before and was never a big fan of Uppitt. Its something I had never learnt cooking it myself and never tried ordering it in many of the Indian restaurants here in US. I had tried cooking it some 2 years back and it did not end up anywhere close to being called Uppitt. When mentioned this to a friend who works with me he said he would make it someday and invite me. That someday never came and its been a running joke between us since then. So I decided to buy 'Rave' (Soji) and other ingredients from the Indian store and try cooking it myself.

First time it came off OK. 2 days later it came off wonderfully well, this time I made it on an early Saturday morning and it went very well with watching Test Match Cricket between India and England. Couple of days later, as there was still some Soji left, I made Uppitt again. So in a single week I made Uppitt 3 times. When I went to the grocery store right after that day and I saw Shavige (vermicelli) which I hadn't eaten in a long time and I remembered,what else, Shavige Uppitt. But the mission Shavige Uppitt was abandoned very early due to my colossal stupidity of putting Shavige in cold water and boiling it instead of adding it to boiling water. I waited one whole day before I went back to the store to get more Shavige and successfully complete the mission thereafter.

The earliest memories of Uppitt I have is when I was in 2nd Standard (Grade). I used to ride in a 'jatka gaadi' (tanga, a horse carriage) to school in India. After dropping us off at the school the jatka gaadi was used to carry government sponsored lunch meals to government schools. Guess what,Mass-produced Uppitt was that lunch meal. On our way back from school the 'jatka mama' (the man who drove the carriage, his name was 'gaadi munna') used to collect all the leftover Uppitt to feed his horses. I still remember the smell of the uppitt which is actually very similar to one you get when you open one of the ready to eat Kharabath packets you get here in US.

When I was in boarding school we were fed a very heavy breakfast. Breakfast was realy good and always 2 courses with a beverage. There were 3 kinds Uppitt that repeated every 2-3 weeks. The standard, a little bit greasy, Upma. Uppitt with tomatoes, carrots, green beans and green peas and then simple avalakki Uppitt made of Pova. The last one was my favorite.

Back home Mom makes 3 different kinds of Uppitt. There is the standard Rave uppitt. The seasonal akki-rave (Rice-Soji) Uppitt which she always makes with avarekalu (Field Beans) which is seasonal. And then the puri Uppitt which she always mixes with fried eggs. My aunt made avalakki Uppitt from time to time. I never liked the standard Uppitt as I thought it was taking up the slot of more delectable breakfast options like Dosa and Rotti. My mom still uses Uppitt as a quick-fix breakfast. When I tell her how I like Uppitt now she reminds of the days when I used to say "Someone should please write a letter to the Chief minister of the state requesting for a ban on Uppitt for 3 years!". Those were the days when food was something that magically appeared every single time I walk into kitchen and food was something I ate and not something I cooked.

Shavige Uppitt is also one of the kind I like very much which is served in breakfast places (hotlu, hotels) in India. Before I came to US there was something else I knew about Uppitt. I remember reading a interview with one of my childhood heroes Dr. H. Narasimhaiah in which he said he survived nearly a year in US eating Uppitt for breakfast as he didn't know to make any other Indian breakfast and how easy it was to make it. I didn't have the full picture then.

Now I do. I ate Uppitt for dinner, breakfast and again for dinner the next day.

Nostalgia Time

The work week that ended today has been a real tedious one. More than the work, the reason is the last weekend when I was on vacation with my College buddies (from Chicago) in Miami,FL. It was a wonderful trip - the snorkeling in the ocean, eating break-fast in the middle of the day with cock-tails made in Paradise, the Beach, And how can I not mention the second most beautiful thing about that beach. Those tanned "beauties" with only one piece of clothing on, is second only to the Beach as Beach itself was so beautiful. Add to that the feeling among us that probably this was last such get-together as bachelors.

Its no wonder that after a vacation like that I was sitting in my cube and thinking "what is the meaning of life?", "Where do we all come from?", "What is the use of life with out vacations like that?". Gradually, that feeling gave way to a feeling of nostalgia about days in Graduate school in Chicago and Engineering college back in India before that. Few key-strokes and right-clicks later, I was transported back in time to my beloved home town thanks to two posts in blogs from people went to same college as I did.

Having grown up in Hostels from a very early age, I have a load of my own Nostalgia about times and places other than my hometown and family. I came back to my hometown Hassan only for college. Its a strange and delightful feeling that I got from reading those two well written posts as their college town is my hometown and look at my hometown as I would look at the places I went to study. I haven't probably met these people and I think they are roughly talking about same time frame as my college days. But, I understand and remember what exactly they are talking about.

Those two posts put together, they get more fascinating for more reasons than I mentioned above. In Lakshmi's post she fondly remembers her days in Ladies hostel and her friends and all the girly (I don't mean to sound sexist which I am not) things. I also got the feeling that she is looking at those times through the present and how she endured it all.

Where as, Manoj's post is more about re-living the past and definitely on this side of the Ladies hostel compound. (he says..."oops !!! we dint have time to visit the LH … which was Mother of all temples of Worship…"...Good one!). He is very brief and remembers all the places (outdoors) that were his haunts and how little Hassan has changed since his time.

Isn't it amazing how we all look at past and think fondly of them even though at the time we thought of them as life's travails?

Big Bang and Expanding Universe!

Couple of months back I was watching a 70's romantic comedy by Woody Allen called "Annie Hall". The movie is really good and stands up to his reputation. It is also full of hilarious dialogues between various characters. One that stood out for me is

Doctor in Brooklyn: Why are you depressed, Alvy?
Alvy's Mom: Tell Dr. Flicker.
[Young Alvy sits, his head down - his mother answers for him]
Alvy's Mom: It's something he read.
Doctor in Brooklyn: Something he read, huh?
Alvy at 9: [his head still down] The universe is expanding.
Doctor in Brooklyn: The universe is expanding?
Alvy at 9: Well, the universe is everything, and if it's expanding, someday it will break apart and that would be the end of everything!
Alvy's Mom: What is that your business?
[she turns back to the doctor]
Alvy's Mom: He stopped doing his homework!
Alvy at 9: What's the point?
Alvy's Mom: What has the universe got to do with it? You're here in Brooklyn! Brooklyn is not expanding!
Doctor in Brooklyn: It won't be expanding for billions of years yet, Alvy. And we've gotta try to enjoy ourselves while we're here!

(Alvy at 9 means, when Alvy (the main character) was 9 years old)

Google Sky

We all had so much fun when Google Earth came out. Now its gotten even better with Google Sky. There are so many Layers and as many things as you can do. There are real cool things to do like making the sky rotate around any given point, tracking the motion of the planet through out the year which is like fast forwarding the sky for the span of the whole year. There are amazing pictures from Hubble and other telescopes.

At the same time it is a very helpful and informative tool too. Over the weekend I was going for the monthly sky watching session organized by the local astronomy group and I wanted to brush up on positions of planets and stars. Instead of good old planisphere I used earlier I gave Google Sky a try. Oh it helps and its super cool.

This past spring I took lessons on sky watching in a planetarium here. To sit in the Sky theater in complete darkness, to fast forward or rewind the Sky from any year to any year and any month to any month and to see how the Skies would look from the poles, equator and different parts of the world was an awesome experience. Although there is nothing like the Shy Theater in a Planetarium to learn about stars and constellations Google Sky is a good tool once you are able to recognize some well known constellations.

Well done Google! Just don't put any Ad's in there.

Sunday Evening Blues

For more than one and half years now there is one thing I am almost certain to do any given week. Play a game of pick-up soccer at 4:30 p.m. on Sunday. This is as if no matter what-else is happening rest of the week I will be there in the park waiting for all other people to turn-up. It is wonderful group of people I play with. As it is a pick-up game and nothing close to being competitive, people are laid-back and sometimes just 4-5 people show up. We end up kicking around for sometime and very rarely the worst comes true - only couple of people showing up! Playing soccer on Sunday evenings sets me up perfectly for the work week starting Monday morning.

Its kind of deja vu for me. When I was in college back in Hassan, India, we played Cricket with tennis-ball at 4:00 p.m. every Sunday. I have wonderful memories those times. It was really fun to play with my buddies some of whom I had known since kindergarten. I did this for almost 5 years. No matter what else I did rest of the week, I was there on the Cricket grounds at 4:00 p.m. Sunday. Even then sometimes it so happened that very few people showed up. It forced us to just knock around for sometime. Although I didn't have to worry about a work week starting Monday, Sunday Cricket was still one of the things I enjoyed most.

There is one more similarity and Irony to those times. Back then, we played in a ground which was common for Cricket and Soccer. On most Sundays there was no one playing soccer And we could play without being bothered. But now and then people showed up for soccer practice. We hated those guys as we had to move from the big ground to a smaller ground next to it. Now, here in Durham, North Carolina, we play soccer in a public park where there are separate fields for Soccer and Baseball and Softball. Soccer field has been closed for renovation for some time now and we end up playing Soccer on baseball field. Now and then people show up for baseball practice and we have to move to a field which is vacant.

I was playing Cricket then and wished no would show up for Soccer practice and Now, I am playing Soccer and wish no would show up for Baseball practice (Base ball being relatively similar to Cricket). As they say, What goes around, comes around!