Chinese Diwali

Gong Xi Fa Cai
(pronounced as "gong si fa chai" -> wishing you prosperity)

Chinese New Year is their festival of prosperity. Chinese New year is the start of New Year as per their calendar. It is a 15 day festival. Sometimes called as Lunar new year, it celebrates, like in India, the beginning of the spring.

New Year Eve reunion
Family members get together for a reunion dinner. Debt are cleared off. Brooms are put away.
In traditional household, one cannot broom for entire during these days, incase you sweep your luck away… (Weird funda)

Yu Sheng
The raw fish salad served as appetizer during reunion dinner. People use their chopsticks to toss the ingredients in to the air and make loud auspicious wishes. The higher you toss the greater your fortune.

Two Oranges
Chinese usually give two oranges as gift on New Year. It symbolizes Good Health and Long Life.

Red Packets
Called hongbao -> gift envelop. Its red in color, color of good luck. Chinese keeps a sum of 8 or many 8. This is because 8 sounds similar to Chinese term for prosperity. The number 4 is considered unlucky num, as it sounds like homonym for death.

New Clothes
Obviously they are Red color cloth.
No White or black..

Sweets
Love letter and Pineapple tarts.

the number 1

Pythagorus believed that "Every thing in the world is made of units or whole numbers"
even music -> where the perfect harmonics tones sound much better than other. Higher harmonics are just combination of 2 or more harmonics. The lowest unit was 1. But later when worked on triangles he realised that his hypothesis was not true.

Arithmetic and Writing
In ancient time man started marking a line for 1. but he did not know how to count for a long time. Then instead of marking they started to keep a conical shaped clay piece. Every piece represents One of something. The use of conical piece was the invention of Arithmetic. Now people have some ones or many ones. When they exchange these pieces it either results in an addition or subtraction operation. Sometimes they used to keep these pieces in a bigger pot to remember the count of something. They also make the equal number of impression from the outside so as to know how many pieces are inside. Then someone realised that the pieces are not required. If they make impression on some sheet for each count it will serve the purpose. This leads to first CA, who keeps the record of things in a book. This also invented WRITING.

Other Numbers
When humans started living in the society, they required to distribute the food and other materials. This made them to invent other number. The first civilization to start using the bigger number were form India. They invented the symbols for 1 -9, which unfortunately are known as Arabic numbers.

From Counting to measuring
To build road and building, we require exact measurement. The need to exactly measure the lenght leads to the invention of ruler. First ruler was equal to the length of arm of some person. Replicas of such ruler were made and used for construction purpose. The first rules was used by Egyptians.

The Zero
The first written document of zero could be found on the wall of a temple in Gwalior. It dates back to 11Th BC. Indians not only invented zero, they invented the digit numbers. By combining different numbers Indians were able to write any number, no matter how big or small was it.
This gave the Indian astrologers edge over the others. They are the first to discover that earth revolves on its axis, and it moves around the sun much before Copernicus. They also calculated the diameter of earth (with only 1% variation).

The number system moves from India to middle east (Iraq). The Muslim law system requires a better number system as many of its law requires to precisely calculate the share. The middle east took the match to new heights with the discovery of algebra, quadratic equation, logarithms...

Indian Numeral Vs Romans
The roman numerals were used by all the Europe as it was under roman control. The other side of Mediterranean sea was using Indian numbers. Fibonacci learned the India numerals from middle east and took them to Europe. It took some time for the Europeans to start using Indian system as they found it little difficult. Also the number ZERO was not clear and was looked with suspicion. They used to call it Cifar. The word Cypher (meaning suspicious) originates it roots from this. But the Indian number system proved much better in calculating exact values especially the interest. With the Capitalism on advance, India system was excepted.

The Binary Numbers
In 16th century, Leibeintz wanted to build a mechanical calculator to get rid of the human error. He realized that we really don't need 10 different numerals to count. All we need is only 1 and 0. He build a binary mechanical calculator. Although he didn't worked much on that. It was only in 1944 that the first calculating m/c was built on binary system. Only this time it was electronic m/c.

जगजीत सिंह की एक ग़ज़ल

बेबसी जुर्म है, हौसला जुर्म है
जिंदगी तेरी एक एक अदा, जुर्म है...
बेबसी जुर्म है, हौसला जुर्म है।

ऐ सनम तेरे बारे मैं कुछ सोच कर -२
अपने बारे मैं कुछ, सोचना जुर्म है।

याद रखना तुझे, मेरा एक जुर्म था -२
भूल जन तुझे, दूसरा जुर्म है

क्या सितम है की तेरे हँसी शहर में -२
हर तरफ़ गौर से, देखना जुर्म है।

मेरी तरफ़ से
हर घड़ी, बस तुझे चाहना जुर्म था -२
हर घड़ी बस तुझे, चाहना जुर्म है।

तेरा चेहरा मेरी आंखों में है बसा -2
अब किसी और को देखना, जुर्म है।

प्यार की जो कहानी शुरू हमें की -२
अब उसे कब्र में, दफनाना जुर्म है।

जिसका भगवान ही उससे रूठा हो जब -२
बेवजह अब मेरा, मुस्कुरना जुर्म है।


अभिषेक पालीवाल की तरफ़ से
जिंदगी के हर के मोड़ पे ठहर कर-२
बीती यादों को यूँ सोचना जुर्म है

अपनी यादों की दुनिया में यूँ डूब कर-२
आती खुशियों से मुहँ मोड़ना जुर्म है।

अजय की तरफ़ से
मुझे देख कर मुस्कुराना वो तेरा, पलकें झुकाना वो तेरा -२
याद करके उसे मेरा आंसू बहाना जुर्म है।

चांदनी रात में साथ वो तेरा, हाथों में हाथ वो तेरा -२
बिन तेरे उस चाँद का निकल आना जुर्म है,

बिन तेरे ऐ दिलबर ...सांसो का आना जाना जुर्म है...
सांसो का आना जाना जुर्म है..........सांसो का आना जाना जुर्म है.............

2008 - Not such a bad year

No doubt, it was a bad year... first oil price hike, inflation, sub prime, top financial companies going bankcrupt, layoffs and then Terror attack... 

but there were atleast 3 things that has made this year truely special. 

1. Chandrayan

2. Olympic Gold medal

3. Golden glode award to and Indian. 

Some might argue that Olympic gold medal is not really an thing to be proud of, as it was purely the result of an individual's effort, capability and of course talent. But in a country of over 1 billion emotional people, it matters a lot. The brilliance of Abhinav Bindra might not change the attitude of the people who can really make a difference, but the moment of trimpuh would remain alive throughout our life time. We will talk abt it while urinating the walls. We will call him our Idol and write essays on him in our school examination. The moment will inspire us, may be not to big things, but just to be happy. 

And who knows, 10 years from now, another Slumdog might just become a millionaire when he would be asked this question " Name the person who one the First individual olympic gold medal for India". 

Singapore - A nation by accident

No one had ever dreamt that Singapore would ever become a country.Actually, no Singaporean leader wanted a separate country.

During II world war, Japanese have taken control of Singapore. They tried to convince people of Singapore of the Asian unity. However, as Japanese have attacked China, and the fact that 75% of people living in Singapore were Chinese, majority did not want Japanese to control the iceland. After the war is over, English men were welcomed in the Singapore. But Britain did not have resources to run the port city. Therefore, they left the country. Singapore was not a metropolis city at that time, but it was a big port. Therefore, it was difficult to believe that English government decided to free the country. Britain left the Malay at the same time. As Singapore depends on Malay for almost every resource except Human resource, its leader decides to merge with Malay. That is why the name changed to Malaysia "SI" for Singapore. Knowing that almost all the trade unions in Singapore are dominated by Chinese people, they asked Singapore state to give especial rights (=quota) to Malay people. Singapore leaders have no option but to agree. This development fueled the wide spread riots between Singaporean Chinese and Malay community. This was the time when people living in Singapore wanted independence. However, as Singapore has no army to protect its port and no resource to feed itself, its leaders did not want an independent state. Reacting to death of Malay people in the riots, leaders in Malaysia decide to throw Singapore out of there country.

Singapore is a free state from 10 Aug 1965. It is said that she become a country by accident.

Just look at the contrast of the situation: When India got freedom, her first prime minister delivered a speech full of hope. On the other hand, Singapore Fist PM wept during his first public address as PM. Abhishek Jain

What is Time

For last some days I have been reading abt time travel, but one thing I am not able to understand... What is the meaning of negative time?

As per my understanding time has no meaning unless it passes... So time is actually the interval between two moments. It is like "length" of an object, which is the distance between two ends of an object/points. It cant be negative. A point object assumed in physics theories has zero length. But unlike LENGTH, the observed time interval between two events could be different for two people, which depends on the speed with which they are moving. Two observer, one stationary wrt earth and other moving at speed lets say at c/2, will observe different readings on their watch between events A and B.  Both observer can disagree for the time interval between two events but they will agree on the order in which the two events occur. 

But some scientist believe that if you travel faster than light, time will run in negative direction.

lets take an example from the book "A Brief History  of Time". 

Lets take first event A to occur on earth in 2012 and second event B on alpha century in 2017. the time is as per earth's time. As alpha centuary is around 4 light years form us, so the event which we see in 2017 must have occured in 2013.  Now for an observer on earth, he will see event A occured first and his watch will agree with his statement. The second observer can move much faster than light,  So he start his space ship when event A occured and move much faster than light to reach Alpha Century just in time to observer event B. But as his watch will show a time before 2012, lets say 2010, he will conclude that event B occured before event A. Thus both observer will not agree on the order of the event. 

The above example does not sound convincing to me. See the observer saw the first event, then started his space ship and then saw the second event. now because his watch/calender shows an earlier time when he was at event B, does not mean he was event B before event A. The problem here is that we have assigned a direction to time, which is merely a interval between duration. its a scalar quantity.  When one travels at a speed more than light our biological clocks would reverse. We would grow younger from older... The notion that our young form come earlier than older form is only true wrt to our present situation in which we are not moving at > C. 

So it is wrong to assign a sign to time. IT IS A RELATIVE QUANTITY AND IT MEASURES THE INTERVAL BETWEEN TWO EVENTS. 

Back stage Challenges in the Skit : Hum Project implement kar chuke sanam…

This skit was full challenges.

First of all, there was very little time to prepare…
And there were very few people to work with.

The condition of the person working on the story was even worse. This is because there were many changes in the songs selected for the script. Songs have to be selected before finalizing the script. This is because performers needs some time to practice for the dance. Most of us were not great dancer, because of which we had to change some songs to match our capabilities. It put added pressure on Ismile bhai and Jahangir they end up having no time to practice… But we took this risk knowing their last performance.

The condition of the performers was also not great. Some of us have delivery deadlines to meet. So after the practice session these people stay late to complete their primary responsibilities. Others who were relatively free took up the challenge to coordinate and train people.

This skit was hugely depended on Audio. We had to collect so many songs and edit them to suits our requirement. If the music system would mot have worked, as happened in the last party, we could not have done even a single scene.

The basic theme of the skit was to present the different stages of life with the help of MUSIC & DANCE. A single step missed by performer (dancer) could have easily turned down the whole skit. We had a challenge to dance so that people can enjoy, act so as to make people laugh, and achieving both without being stupid.

Of the other challenge, the one was to meet the high expectation after the superb performance by Ismile bhai in he last party. To meet that expectation we took the bollywood way. But this made our task little more difficult. Because now we require 10+ people to perform… with absolutely no time and no resource to work with, this looked like an impossible task. That was the time when some new face in GE showed great interest in performing with us. We also got good support from the Anchors for the event.

I don’t know how well did we perform, but I know one thing I enjoyed a lot to be part of the skit. And I can say he same for all those were part of this skit…

Abhishek Jain