Creator, Preserver and Destroyer

15th June 2016, 11:40pm: It was another hectic day at office. To rejuvenate my exhausted brain, I switched on my WiFi and watched Bhagavad Gita Episodes of Mahabharat in YouTube. As I was watching the Vishwaroop Darshan episode (B.R.Chopra Mahabharat - Episode 74), something struck my mind. As soon as the episode ended, I immediately started watching the episodes of a Discovery Channel series in succession - How the Universe Works (Black Holes - How the Universe Works ᴴᴰ | S01E02 | Black Holes and How the Universe Works ᴴᴰ | S04E03 | Monster Black Hole ). By the time, the episode ended, I was almost on the verge of sleeping with my laptop still powered on. Fortunately, I was able to switch off the laptop and WiFi before retiring to bed. While I was enjoying the mythological episode followed by a sci-fi series, my subconscious mind was voraciously feeding on the information present in those video movies.

In the Dream: "I am the Creator, Paarth... I am the Preserver as well as the Destroyer... I am the Beginning of the Universe, the Middle as well as the extreme End point... Beyond Me, there is nothing... I am Time... I am the fabric of Space & Time on which Everything is Present..."

In the faint echo of these verses, there appeared a super-massive black hole right in front of my eyes. The extreme radiation felt like witnessing the glare of a million million trillion Suns together. I was witnessing the fiery storm of space & time being dragged into this giant cosmic sinkhole. Whatever I had read in my 10+2 Physics books was happening right before my eyes. Time was slowing down by the unimaginable gravity of the scary black disc ahead of me. The faster I tried to run from it, the slower I was moving. Everything that my common sense dictated was going haywire.
I woke up with a start only to hear the sound of the ceiling fan rotating at full speed. I was profusely sweating. It took me a few seconds to realize that it was a God gifted nightmare. After drinking a glass full of water, I again retired to bed.

Waking Up: Black Holes are the Creators, Preservers as well as Destroyers in the Universe we live in. They are created when extremely heavy stars collapse under their own gravity. The explosion created when such stars collapse, is so violent and extreme that, it destroys and rips a hole in the very fabric of spacetime, upon which, our entire universe exists. Sub-atomic particles, atoms, molecules, including all the laws of Physics and Chemistry that we know of, break down. Even the light that helps us to see things cannot escape this inescapable & infinite well of gravity. The gravity is so strong that, at the boundary of a Black Hole, time essentially stops. This is something that I read in an article in the Times of India, way back in 2007 (LEADER ARTICLE: Where Time Stands Still).

This extreme description of one of the most bizarre and scariest places in the universe, is enough to knock out senses. No wonders, after witnessing the Vishwaroop, Arjuna appealed to Sri Krishna to return to his original human form. But, despite the scary stuff, these extreme cosmic wonders present a beautiful cycle of creation, preservation and destruction. A Black Hole is formed by the destruction of a star. Its unimaginable gravity attracts gas and dust which creates stars, planets, asteroids, comets and galaxies. Without their gravity, all of this would be flung apart in space. They help preserve the individual galaxies by acting as a universal glue. In fact, our Sun is also orbiting around a super-massive black hole Sagittarius A* at a distance of 26000 light years. When it comes to destruction, these cosmic cannibals are the ultimate destroyers. They rip and incinerate things to the extreme. They are truly the end point of our knowledge and existence that we know of. The following wraps up Everything -

“Black holes are where God divided by zero.” - Albert Einstein (1879-1955)

Homecoming

Days after days... Months after months... Nothing can beat that enthusiasm of Homecoming; especially when one lives far away from Home... :)

My saga of homecoming started during my B.Tech days in Burla. Though the town is just 160 Km away from my hometown Rourkela, still planning for homecoming every fortnight was more meticulous than the NASA space missions.. ;) :D As I was browsing through the archives of my photo library, I just happened to get across this image, which describes the magnitude of the excitement.

This is a snapshot of my mid-semester examination schedule when I was in the first year of college. The date-time stamp 8/11/2008, 1330 hrs is self-explanatory... :D

Even today my hostel roommates from the college days, still pull my leg, saying that I used to pack my bags as early as a couple of weeks before the actual homecoming day. During those days, I was so frequently traveling between home and college, that I used to carry a print-out of train-schedule at Rourkela station for my travel convenience. Traveling to home at the shortest notice with the cheapest price was the sole motto. The best thing was the adventure involved in coming home from college. Rather than taking a direct bus to reach home in 5 hours, I used to travel in all available modes to reach home just in time. 

The journey to home would start with a share auto from Burla town to Ainthapalli Chowk via NH-6. This first leg of my journey used to take 20 minutes and a nominal fare of Rs 10. At the fag end of the chowk, buses to Jharsuguda were readily available with a frequency of one bus every half an hour. I used to complete my next leg of journey in such a bus. The intermediate travel in a Bus to Jharsuguda used to cost me somewhere around Rs 35. In terms of time consumed, the bus journey took some 100 minutes. The bus would terminate at Jharsuguda Bus Stand. With a huge bag on my shoulders, my immediate priority was to find, what I still refer as "The Wormhole". It was actually a hole made in the wall which separates the bus stand from the railway station. In simple terms, a journey through "The Wormhole" would teleport me at a place near to the railway junction west cabin. From the railway cabin to the ticket counter, I used to rely on my feet & stamina for running  approximately half a kilometer. Any announcement of next incoming train was typically a boost up signal for my brain, to pump up the adrenaline necessary for sprinting with Usian Bolt speed to the ticket counter asap. Depending on the time of my arrival at the station, I used to calculate the arrival of the next train and purchase tickets accordingly. Though I always planned to board the Haridwar-Puri Kalinga Utkal Express at 3:15 pm, but boarding the Yashwantpur-Tata/Hatia Superfast at 2:50 pm, felt like an icing on the cake. The best part in boarding the super-fast train was that, it had a non-stop run at full throttle from Jharsuguda to Rourkela, covering the 103 Km last leg of my journey in just 70 mins. On the other hand, the usual slower Kalinga Utkal Express had 2 intermediate stops and covered the same distance in 100 mins. No matter which train I used to board, as the train crossed Rajgangpur, I used to call up my father to pick me up from the railway station. By 5:15 pm, mommy used to serve me the day's lunch, as she always knew I would definitely skip the lunch at hostel in sheer excitement. :D

However, nowadays the excitement seems lost. Perhaps the marathon journey of 1607 Km from Pune to Rourkela is taking its toll. Though, the journey to home is a tiring 27 hours long one, still, the adrenaline starts pumping once again as the train crosses the famous "Diamond Crossing" after Nagpur Jn.

As the train starts accelerating after the famous Diamond Crossing, the reading on the milestones painted on the electric poles besides the tracks would change from 835 to 1132; indicating that the train is running on the BNR (Bengal-Nagpur Route) of Indian Railways. From that moment onwards, I would start reverse counting the milestone readings, eagerly awaiting for the 414th Kilometer milestone which mark the platforms of Rourkela. As the train reaches Bilaspur, at 4:30 pm, I would call up mommy and tell her about my dinner menu. Around 7:45 pm, the train finally enters Odisha via Jharsuguda Jn. For the next hour I eagerly await the usual clickety-clack sound of the train to change its pitch to a metallic sound, indicating the crossing of the Brahmani rail bridge. At the instant the metallic sound dies away and the train start decelerating, I pull out my luggage from underneath the berth and wait near the gates. Slowly, the train crawls into the platform and thus my 27 hour long homecoming journey ends.

All these years, the mode of my homecoming has changed; from the adventure filled Burla to Rourkela journey to the monotonous Pune to Rourkela train journey. But the joy of booking tickets for homecoming and eagerly awaiting the journey date is an evergreen experience in itself... :)

Automation - The Rise and Fall of Machines

As I sub-consciously glanced at my smartphone and opened up WhatsApp messenger, I realized the extremely rapid technological advancement we humans have undergone. I remember, there was a time, when I accompanied my mother to the PCO booth, as she would dial and have a casual sister gossip with my aunt. From the 90's era PCO to WhatsApp messenger, it has been an incredible journey of technological renaissance; all credits to the mantra of "Automation".

The idea of automation started when we identified the repetitive, tedious and error prone activities in our day to day life and programmed computers and machines to perform them. For instance, there was a time when my father would return home with a bundle of currency notes on his pay day and put it into designated envelopes to manage the monthly expenses. To get this bundle of notes, he had to sweat few hours standing in a bank queue. Thanks to automation, the entire saga of standing in a bank queue, handling the bundle of currency notes and the monotonous activity of putting of the notes in designated envelopes has been replaced by a single and simple SMS - "Your salary for the month has been credited in a/c no. XXXXXXXX". Thanks to a government portal and the associated automation, the filing of Income Tax returns has become lot easier than ever. From booking a movie ticket at the nearest multiplex to paying utility bills via online banking, an automatic smartphone app can do it all. This is truly an age of the "Rise of Machines" where every device has become more smarter and more efficient to aid mankind in every possible way that we can imagine.

But as a general rule, when everything looks very hunky dory, there is always some sign of trouble brewing up, underneath our feet. This extremely heavy dependency on automation has made us over-confident and careless. A few days back as I was returning after shopping from Big Bazaar, I decided to book a cab to home. Due to some network issues, my cab booking app was unable to connect to the company servers. So I decided to call them instead, and book my cab. But, to my amazement, even the cab company's call center executives were unable to book a cab on my verbal request, as booking was allowed via smartphone app only. Though, the network issue got resolved and finally I was able to book my cab for the return journey, still this raises an important concern. The concern is that, excessive dependence on automation and its extensive use as a measure of crowd control has made us callous. In this case, the app developers were so confident that they virtually left nothing for manual intervention as a fail-safe mechanism. What if someone needs a cab urgently but the smartphone data connection network is unavailable ?? This scenario reminds me of the exuberant branding of Titanic as "The Unsinkable" ship. As a result, the shipping company did not provide enough lifeboats for escaping in case of a disaster. What happened, as a consequence of that, got clearly etched in the pages of history on 14th April 1912, when the "Unsinkable" ship sank in the icy Atlantic waters killing over 1500 people onboard.

As I pen down these thoughts, my mind races back to the school days when we had a debate competition - "Can machines replace humans ??" I don't know, whether the topic is debatable or not, but my answer to this is a big NO. Machines, computers and the entire idea of automation is a wonderful creation of human brain, which in turn, is an extremely fine tuned product of evolution of life, spanning over millions of years. When I say, 'extremely fine tuned', I mean to say that no other creature has the brain power to think of this wonderful idea. How many of us have seen a lion creating another mechanical lion and programming it to hunt ?? This means, for something to replace human beings, it should be more finely tuned in the evolutionary process than humans have undergone. In other words, making a process fully automatic and removing all sort of manual intervention is like starting a brake-less vehicle at full throttle. So, to sum it up, technology and automation are a boon as long as they have a human element involved with them. The moment, the human element is lost, they can become real-time liabilities.

"The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency." - Bill Gates