Child's play

Kittu was sitting on a stool in the kitchen watching his mother cook.  This was one of his favorite activities of the day.  He thought of her as an incarnation of God in converting vegetables and spices into delicious food.  Her knowledge of what needs to be done when and how amazed him.  The process seemed too complex with the cutting of vegetables, placing vessels on fire, heating of oil, spices and other ingredients falling into the hot oil, slowly the aroma picking up and finally the smell and sight of the piping hot food.  But she seemed to go through the whole process without stopping a moment to think.  He wanted to cook like her.  Kittu's mother was thrilled to see his son's interest and eagerly answered all his queries.  But she was very disappointed to observe the total lack of interest he had in consuming the food.  It took her an hour to feed a small plate of the same food that he had watched being cooked with such great interest.

One morning, when Kittu craned his neck to look at the vegetable cooking, something spluttered from within the vessel.  Kittu moved back to avoid it and in the process lost balance.  His head hit the floor and he started wailing.  His mother picked him up and saw blood flowing from the back of his head.  She ran out with the child in her arms and called out to their neighbor.  Soon, they were zipping to the neighborhood doctor in a car.  Kittu had a towel wrapped around his head.  The part of the towel covering the back of his head was drenched in blood.  Kittu was sobbing more due to panic than pain.  His mother too had tears in her eyes but said words of comfort to the child.  Soon they reached at the doctors and ran into his chamber much to the annoyance of the patients waiting outside.

The doctor had a look at the wound and let them know that it was not serious - A few stitches on the back of Kittu's head should do the job.  A few wailing minutes later, Kittu walked out of the doctor's chamber with a bandage round his head. The tear tracks glistened down his cheeks but he wore a look of pride in his eyes and a proud smile on his lips.  He looked around at the faces of waiting patients who looked at him with a mix of sympathy, amusement and annoyance.  He sat alone in the back seat of the car on the way back home.  He felt like a king with the crown of bandage on his head and did his best to make it visible to the people passing by.

Kittu was tucked into bed as soon as he got home, the TV was set to the cartoon network channel and a plate of biscuits was placed on his side.  He spent a blissful hour in this manner and then spent a ghastly hour having his lunch.  After lunch, he asked his mother if she had informed the neighbors about his accident.  When she gave an affirmation, he gave out a sigh that smelled of disappointment.  He asked her to get the mobile, call each of them and hand him over the phone to him.  Kittu only had one line to tell each of them "You know I am hurt and have not even bothered to visit me.  Shame on you".  He did not wait to hear the response.

An hour later, the neighbors filled Kittu's room.  He looked at each of them with a smile, picked up the remote and switched on the TV.  He then asked everyone to leave the room as he had to watch his favorite cartoon.

A Nano obstruction in my way

I turned my car the road that takes me to my office.  My car was right behind a tanker, which slowed down as soon as it turned into the road.  It came to a standstill within a few metres.  I stopped and waited a few seconds before impatience set in.  I started cranking my head to the right through the window to see what happened.  I could see the nose of a car in front of the tanker.  It was not moving and seemed to have broke down in the middle of the road.  It was not clear if the tanker had rammed into the car.  I did not see any crowding around the scene and so assumed that was not the case.  I sat there and waited for a few more seconds nothing happened.  I looked out of the window again; everything remained the same - the car's nose was seen ahead of the tanker.  My frustration was building.  I took out my phone and looked at the set of applications on it.  I had looked through almost everything of interest that morning.  My finger moved towards the "Temple run 2" application but en route it stopped on top of CNN and pressed it.  The application opened and I saw the top news "Teen survives flight to Hawaii in jet's landing gear".  "Ah! The American sensationalism" thought my mind.  I looked down at the other news, which consisted of a mish-mash of the sunken Korean ship, the Ukraine problem and MH370 search.  These had been going on for so long now that my mind had started ignoring them.  I looked out of window again to check the status - The tanker's driver was shouting something at the car and its occupant(s).  I opened the news on the teen's escapade and glanced through it.  A teenager had run away from his home in California; he jumped over the fence at the San Jose airport and roamed around for a few hours before climbing into the landing gear of an aircraft.  As soon as the aircraft took off guy passed out.  When he woke up, the aircraft had already landed.  He got off the landing gear and gave the ground personnel at the Hawaii airport the shock of their lives.  He had survived a 38000 feet travel at sub zero temperature with no oxygen.  Apparently, he was not the first one to try - since 1947, 105 people have attempted to fly inside the landing gears on 94 flights worldwide with a success rate of around 24%, said the article.

It was a good 10 minutes since I had been stuck at that spot.  There were a number of vehicles behind me and a lot of honking filled the air.  A traffic police man was running towards the car in front of the tanker.  A few people had crowded around the scene by now.  Soon, the car started moving.  It was a Nano that had stalled in front of the tanker.  The occupants of the car were in no hurry to get out of the way.  The tanker driver's words hurt their ego and apparently an argument started.  The police came by and almost spanked the car's occupants.  The owner of the car (I assume) sat comfortably inside while the driver pushed the car towards the other side of the road with one hand while the other held the steering wheel.  The tanker started moving and I was on my way to the office.

Weed and the gallows

The year 1971, seems to be coming back into my life quite strongly over the past couple of days.  After the article about the two girls who disappeared on a special day in 1971, here is something about an incident that occurred in the year 1971.  The number 420 is a special code for Marijuana.  Apparently, in the year 1971, four teenagers met at 4:20PM to search for a piece of land that grew Marijuana.  They never found the plot but had a whale of a time smoking the weed.  Since then the number 420 stuck to Marijuana.  Seems silly but it has a reference to the year 1971.

http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-27039192

In Iran, a man was convicted to death for a killing 7 years ago.  The man was then 19 and had killed a 17 year old in a street fight.  The man was brought to the gallows; there were a number of people waiting and watching.  A few people started shouting "forgive him".  The man and his family were in tears as the noose went round his neck.  Suddenly, the victim's mother walked towards the man, slapped him and removed the noose.  Everyone were stunned and many, including the police, started crying.  Apparently, this was the finale of many rounds of negotiation.  Quite touching and once again brings back the question of "is capital punishment necessary?" 

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27070087

Arbit coincidence

Many years ago...  Er, no!  Let me change that.  Some years ago two teen aged girls on their way to a party in South Dakota disappeared.  No body had a clue about what happened to them till last September when a car lying upside down appeared in a lake around the place the girls' intended destination.  They found the remains and some other objects belonging to the girls.  There was no alcohol or any clue of foul play.  It seems like an accident.  The date of disappearance of the two girls?  29 May 1971!!!
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/15/us/south-dakota-cold-case-missing-girls/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Watch a girl grow from 0 to 14 in 4 minutes.
http://www.cnn.com/video/data/2.0/video/us/2014/04/14/natpg-zero-to-fourteen-in-four-minutes.frans-hofmeester.html

I have just started growing a beard and here comes a news on beards being "so 2013" in BBC.  Even after so many years on planet Earth, I continue to defy the laws of fashion and attraction.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-27023992

In BBC,
"Neurogastronomy is based on the realisation that everything we eat or drink is processed by our senses"
 "We see it, we hear it, we smell it, we taste it, we feel it. All those senses come together."
" idea of listening to the sounds of the seaside to enhance the flavours of a seafood dish."
"Those eating pink strawberry cake from the white plates rated the dessert as 10% sweeter than those who ate from the black plates."
"have shown that introducing a square or angular plate intensifies the difference, with roundness accentuating sweetness."
"It seems we associate higher notes, flutes and tinkling piano, with sweetness - deeper, more resonant tones evoke bitterness."
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-26925249

IBM mainframe, Flying fish, Bush and fishy Pakistan

In Pakistan, infancy seems to have lost its innocence.  A nine month old has been booked on an attempted murder charge.  Apparently, the infant was around when his family threw bricks at the police and this, according to the police, amounted to attempted murder.  So the police took him in custody, fingerprinted him and brought him to the court.  A case of innocence lost in nonsense.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/05/world/asia/pakistani-baby-charged/index.html?hpt=hp_c5

"The IBM mainframe is celebrating its 50th anniversary.  The first System 360 mainframe was unveiled on 7 April 1964 and its arrival marked a break with all general purpose computers that came before."  The article in BBC goes on to say 

The machines have a legacy seen on many modern keyboards, he said. The "escape" was a common way to exit from a menu system on a mainframe and the "SysRq" key on some keyboards also dates from that era of monolithic computing. "If you were using a terminal-based system, 'System Request' let you interrupt what you were doing and run another job," he said. "But I'm not sure it's ever had a use in Windows."

http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-26886579

Former US president George Bush (the junior one) is opening an exhibition of his paintings.  From the few pictures that I have seen in the BBC site, they seem good and a few people have given their guarded appreciation.  Looking at the past, it seems unbelievable that Bush has done something that is being appreciated by others.  Apparently, there is a gem (not a very expensive one, but a gem anyway) in this rock too.  

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-26890910

I have seen flying fishes during some of my journeys on water.  They are definitely not an uncommon site and if you keep looking at the water from your vessel for a few minutes, you would definitely catch the sight of a couple of them.  A TV crew in Japan has captured footage of a fish flying for 45 seconds.  It was flying parallel to a ferry that was travelling at 30 Kmph.  The article says "There are some 40 species of "flying fish" in the family known as Exocoetidae. The animals are found worldwide in warmer waters".  

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7410421.stm

Eva Braun, Kurt Cobain and dog poop

I don't see this news in many of the bigger news sites but rediff with some other not necessarily-credible-news sites claim that Hitler's wife Eva Braun's ancestry was Jewish.  Apparently, the DNA analysis of a hair taken from her hairbrush gave that result.  The article says "In the 19th century, many Ashkenazi Jews in Germany converted to Catholicism" and that Eva was a part of that group.

Twenty years ago on this day (Apr 5), Kurt Cobain said enough.

He

Went

As he was

As he could

As he wanted it to be

As in pain

As in pain

As an old enemy

Didn't take his time

Hurried up

This was his choice

Not to be late

For a rest

A news of interest from some days back "Dogs poop in alignment with Earth’s magnetic field, study finds" (http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/dogs-poop-in-alignment-with-earths-magnetic-field-study-finds/).  Since then I have been observing dogs but those damned creatures don't seem to poop much.  Of the five or six cases that I have seen only one of the dogs bothered to find the magnetic field before pooping.  The rest of them pooped any which way they wanted to.  Must be a case of Indian dogs like Indian humans don't like to follow rules.

Placebos and lions

Two interesting articles today.

The first is in CNN.  It talks on placebos being effective in making our day better.   The article mentions " a 2010 survey of more than 400 docs found that a whopping 56% said they'd actually prescribed placebos to their patients".  In some manner or other the placebos seem to "solve" the patient's issues and makes him/her feel better.  What is interesting is that the placebo need not be in a medicinal form.  A study was conducted on two sets of students who were hooked onto equipment that the students thought measured the quality of sleep.  In reality, the machine did not measure the sleep quality.  In the morning, the researchers told one group of students that as per the equipment measured their quality of sleep was good.  The other group was informed the opposite.  The two group of students then went through a test.  Surprisingly, the group that thought they slept well performed better.  In this case, just the words "you slept well" were good enough and qualified as a placebo.  As the article states "Placebos seem to work in large part because they are given by authority figures".  The article then goes on to detail how we can trick ourselves and take advantage of the placebo effect.  The article is available at http://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/01/health/placebo-effect/index.html?hpt=hp_mid

BBC talks about the origin of the modern lions.  One fact that is noticeable is that currently there are two groups of lions.  The first is found in Eastern and Southern Africa and other group is found in Central and West Africa, and in India.  The article goes on to detail how the two groups emerged and how one of the groups reached India.  Of course, there is sadness in the fact that many species of lions have gone extinct - "Fewer than 400 Asian lions (P. leo persica) survive, living on the Kathiawar Peninsula of India".  The article is available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/26736688