31

07/05

Wasn’t it enough for a week ?

12:23 by Nash. Filed under: All

Guess what, 48 hour flood warning again, and the chief minister of the state asks people to stay at home. Apparently, the water logging has already started in some places and traffic is beginning to halt. … The tide is going out though, so it will hopefully take a turn for the better.



30

07/05

When the Rain Gods were angry….

21:18 by Nash. Filed under: All

This last week has been the most chaotic week in memory, not just my memory, but Mumbai’s memory as well. In brief, on Tuesday, 26th July, it rained, and rained like hell…and that’s putting it mildly. Never before had Mumbai recieved 900mm (yes!) rainfall ina period of 24 hours. Entire neighbourhoods went under 9 feet of water in the suburbs like Borivli and Dahisar, and water logging was rampant through out the city. BEST buses (public transport) sank, small cars were completely submerged and sometimes swayed and flung about in swift water…the local train service was suspended and phone lines were jammed. There was no power for a day or so, to avoid short circuiting and electrocutions….

Thats the bigger picture.

As for me, I was on my way home from IIT as it rained. Incidentally, the bus I take comes through Aarey Colony, a lush green region that has 4 rivers flowing through it….great every single one was flooded….and though my bus didn’t sink…we were stalled for about 3 hours…cellphones were jammed and I decided to walk. As the picture shows, Aarey colony is a beautiful place in this weather…so I was lookin forward to a nice stroll out…

A few seconds out of the bus in the pouring rain and I became aware of the magnitude of what was happening…cars and bikes were swept of the road in gushing water…and people formed a human chain through the swift water. I wanted to take some cool pictures of the scene but the force of the water was too much and without a steady foothold I was in no mood to try and take pictures… So in waist high water I trudged along slowly…through all four rivers until I came to the Western Express Highway…where the road I came from was marked closed and there was general commotion. Apparently, water was the problem everywhere. I walked towards home about 10 km from that point …and along the way I saw landslides…boulders as big as trucks had come crashing down…and a foot of water on the roads was the standard everywhere…

Closer to home, is the Mahindra and Mahindra Factory, which usually has a lot of brand new Jeeps parked in their factory lots. Not that day, all I could see was water…I could manage to take a snap.

And then I took more as I walked some from Kandivli ….overturned cars, flooding, drains overflowing…people in the middle of it…the whole deal.














And here is a whole wall and part of road that got washed away with the water..

The worst affected were people in the slums …

When I came home, there was no power of course…and someone was stuck in the elevator….it was impossible to call anyone…the fire brigade flatly told us that there were poeple drowning and they could only come when it was all taken care off..Cant blame ‘em. The guy from the lift company finally did arrive , drenched and had lost is bike in the water….sunk into a drain…literally.

The radio stations kept people entertained and informed all through, especially those who were on the roads, stuck in traffic jams that didnt move till the next day. radio news told us that the airport was closed, flights diverted….all trains coming in were halted outside Mumbai …roads leading out of Mumbai, including the famous Mumbai-Pune Expressway was closed due to numerous landslides…and with phone lines and internet services down…Mumbai was closed to the world.

Fortunately, my bro reached home relatively quickly..since his college is nearby…and Pooja was at home that day…so was Dad…So it was good for us…over the next two days, I heard from friends about being trapped in chest high water in a BEST bus (Shraddha)…walking on the rail tracks to get home(Zankruti), walking from Dadar to Thane…thats about 30KM …(Amar). And almost every second person had his home flooded…
My Dad’s Uncle had his entire bungalow submerged in water…he’s lost everything (quite literally) and gained a foot high layer of silt in his house. and is staying with us now…he got lucky and wasnt home that day….and neither was his daughter.

In some places, the death toll is still rising..Mumbai is back on track…but its still reeling from the aftermath…Even three days later…a 747 skidded off the runway on Mumbai airport and onto the grass because of the excessive water….no casualties though.

What this revelaed though is the spirit of Mumbai…on the roads, any car that had space in it would stop and collect the stranded from the roads. People were helping each other as the emergency services were strained…those at home distributed food and water on the roads to those trapped in the 15 hour traffic jam…volunteers helped divert some traffic away from flooded areas and human chains were formed around drains to prevent people from getting sucked in the tremendous water flow there….

Of late, I had started getting tired of Mumbai’s hectic lifestyle, but this little adventure and the human spirit here has reminded me why I love this city so much….nothing can bring its people down. :)


Update : Amar has written a good blog with news links …and coincidentally chosen a similar title :) . To visit his blog look in the blogs section on the right.



25

07/05

The day has dawned…

09:24 by Nash. Filed under: All

Finally, Autumn Sem-05 begins tomorrow. The updates so far have been few and rather far between, and they will be even more so now. I am thinking of moving this computer over to my room at IIT if I really need to. But since I have not yet gotten a handle over my time-table and he time I will spend working on my project, I have not decided to disconnect and so on. Taking the older computer there will also require quite a bit of shifting around…

Anyhow, time to focus on the tasks at hand….enough lazing.



15

07/05

Die, Linux, Die!!

00:35 by Nash. Filed under: All

As many of us realized, Linux is really powerful *if* one can get it to work, which is usually a herculean task. I read a lot of blogs and forums on Linux, and here is a very funny and informative post from a frustrated user :



I’ve been using computers since 1979, when the physics lab had an IMSAI 8080 set up that used paper tape to boot to dual 8 inch floppy drives. The IMSAI 8080 ran CP/M and it was simple and straightforward to use. You fed in the paper tape, then you made sure the 8 inchy floppy boot disk was in the A: drive, and then you typed in commands into the terminal once the system came up. It worked. You didn’t have to worry about stuff.

My first computer, an Apple II+, also just worked. The machine booted from ROM and gave you a prompt. It just worked.

My first IBM PC was pretty much the same deal as the Apple, except that you had to have a DOS boot disk in the A: drive when you turned on the IBM PC. Then you typed commands in when the system came up from the floppy drive. It was all straightforward. It just worked.

I’ve been trying to learn linux and haven’t gotten anywhere. Linux doesn’t work. Let me give you 6 simple examples: [1] AbiWord. It doesn’t work. It’s broken at a basic level. To print you have to mess with CUPS. And CUPS is a disaster. I was never able to get CUPS to work. Apparently CUPS works something like sendmail, and you have to tell the printer to LISTEN to some cockamamey IP address before you can get it to print. What I want to point out here is how insane that idea is. The notion that, first, you assume the default is a network with 10,000 computers hooked up to another network of 10,000 printers, so you have to default all the printers to ignore whatever you print until you turn one specific printer on. That’s crazy. An individual user will NEVER have a setup like that. NEVER. *Ever*. Period. And the notion that, second, you are lying to the user. Linux implies that when AbiWord tells the printer to print, then it will print. You’d think. Wouldn’t you? Why else have a menu that you can use to print stuff? But no. It’s all a lie. Turns out that when you send a print job to CUPS, you get nothing, even after configuring the printer, unless you do a lot of complicated mumbo-jumbo that I never was able to figure out. That’s insane. It’s like setting up a car to start only after you turn the ignition key _and_ get out and open the trunk _and_ slam the rear left door twice _and_ honk the horn 3 times in a row _and_ switch the headlights on and off 7 times. It’s stupid. No sensible person would expect a car to work that way, and no sane person would set up a car so it would only start if you followed that procedure. To start a car, you turn the key in the ignition. (On really old cars, you press a button while pulling the choke lever. But same idea.) To print in linux, you should tell linux what printer you have and then choose PRINT from the menu in AbiWord. If it doesn’t work that way in linux, it’s broken. It works that way on the Mac in OS 9 and it works that way in Windows. Linux has broken printing and it lies to me. I don’t like functions in computers that are broken (like the early Windows 1.0 that shipped word processors but had no printer drivers — remember that winner?) and I especially don’t like a computer to lie to me. I won’t even go into the issue of how on linux everything emulates postscript, including a dot matrix printer driver. That’s so crazy it sounds like something from the chill-out tent at Burning Man. I won’t even discuss that, it’s too ludicrous.

[2] Installing new software. I began to see a common pattern in all linux operations when I tried installing new software. Linux lied to me once again. To install software on every other computer I ever used for the past 25 years, I copy the software onto the system disk and then use the software. On every other computer, that works. But not on linux. In linux, if you copy software onto your linux drive and double click on it you get nothing. Drop to the command line and tell the software to run. Nothing. Instead, you have to do crazy pointless things like download libs. Why? What was the developer doing instead of putting together a program that worked…smoking dope? On every other computer, the developers include everything a program needs to run — not on linux. On linux you download the program, then you get dependency hell. This is a euphemism. “Dependency hell” is a fancy way of saying “The linux programmer was too stupid or too careless or too incompetent to actually include all the stuff the program needs to run. So you have to clean up the stupid ignorant incompetent linux programmer’s mess.” I don’t like cleaning up a programmer’s messes. When I did that I was called a supervisor and I got paid for it. I’m not being paid to run linux as an end user. So I’m not interesting in cleaning up programmer’s messes. I also don’t like being lied to. Even when I was getting paid to clean up programmer’s messes, I wouldn’t stand for some programmer lying to me. When a program gets distributed the obvious and sensible conclusion is that it’s ready to run. You download it, you figure it will run. Guess what? In linux, it usually doesn’t run. And so, when you find out the program doesn’t run because it’s missing libgetc and blah blah blah, you realize…hey. Looka this! You’ve been lied to. Yes, this program is ready. No, it isn’t, hahahaha, we lied. Look at the silly expression on your face, you luser. Oh? Look at this. It’s my ass leaving linux behind. Now who’s the luser?

[3] Linux seems built on a simple philosophy — find out what the user needs to do and prevent it. Case in point: I downloaded a big application package, Planet CCRMA, and followed the directions for installing it. Didn’t work. The instructions included a lot of arcane shell commands to install the software. After I ran the shell commands, nothing was installed. Nobody could explain this. You go online and tell people, “Those commands don’t work,” and you know what you get? Laughed at. “Ask for a refund,” they giggle. Funny. Meanwhile, nothing works, and none of the so-called linux “gurus” can explain why. So I tried a bunch of stuff. I tried using a linux text editor to edit the config files. Whoops! YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO ACCESS THIS FILE. What the hell is that? Let’s think about this. You have a config file and you have a text editor, and you cannot use the text editor to edit the config file. That’s insane. That’s not just hard to use, that’s actively _user-hostile_. That’s finding out what the user needs to do and actively *preventing* it. Around this time I started to get a grasp on the linux way of doing things. First, lie to the user. Second, tell the user “in order to do X, you must first do Y” — then prevent the user from doing Y. Third, make fun of the user when s/he points this out. There’s a word for that: evil. Linux is evil. And the linux user community seems to have come straight out of the movie THE EXORCIST. The only thing that surprises me about the linux online community is that when a n00b asks for help, their heads to don’t rotate 360 degrees while spitting up pea soup. Linux seems *designed* to frustrate you. And you have to admire the ingenuity with which linux is designed to frustrate you. I’m not a complete novice. You’d think I’d be able to figure out how to get linux to do *something.* But I never could. The people who designed linux must have spend millions of man-hours figuring out all the possible ways of getting something done in linux, and then carefully deducing out with diabolical ingenuity how to block the user and stymie the user and smack the user down hard when the user tries every one of those myriad ways of getting something done. That’s pretty impressive, when you think about it. Just imagine all those combinatorial ways of combining commands, and yet linux manages to make sure they all give an error message. Every since combination. Every single option. All designed to block the end user. That’s an amazing achievement, in a perverse sort of way. Admirable — but sick. And crazy.

[4] Command line. Look, I started with a command line. It was okay. In 1979. We didn’t have anything better. The command line is still the best way to do some types of tasks. Batch jobs, for instance. If I want to rename or delete or copy every file with the extension *.mp3 on my drive, you can bet I don’t want to clik on all 57,291 of those icons. But we are not living in 1979 anymore. The idea that you have to drop to the command line to do anything significant, like install software, is insane. That’s 25 years out of date. Every time I use linux I feel like I’m back in the physics lab with a monochrome screen and an all-uppercase terminal. Linux should come with 8 inch floppy drives and a paper tape reader to boot the 8″ drives. This idea of typing in arcane commands to do everything is nuts. Whoever dreamed that up was drunk or stupid. That may have been fine for 1970, or even 1979, but it’s the 21st century, and let me tell you, I’ve gotten use to installing software by double-clicking it, or installing printers by scrolling down a list and choosing one, or setting up a sound driver by popping in a CD and letting it autoplay and autoinstall. If linux can’t do that, what the hell is it good for? I’m not interested in living in 1979. Been there. Done that. I was using computers then. I don’t want to go back to 1979 and I don’t think any other users do either, except for some linux geeks who seem to love memorizing and typing 59-char-long strings of gobbledygook.

[5] Mount and umount. What is this? Look, if there’s one thing I hate, it’s being lied to. When a machine tells me DO X AND Y WILL HAPPEN, and I do X and Y doesn’t happen, it’s baseball-bat time. I get lied to enough by people. Just turn on the news from Washington. Ever work for a boss? People lie to you all the time, that’s bad enough. I don’t need to be lied to by my machines. Think about this — how far would you get if your car had a fuel gauge that read HALF FULL when it was actually EMPTY? Your ass would wind up stranded on the freeway in the middle of nowhere. You’d be walking home. Linux does the same thing. Linux lies to me, and it lies to me *constantly*. Linux presents me with a bunch of nice icons of disk drives. But when I click on one, guess what? It’s not mounted! So I can’t write to it! I can’t read from it! This is insane. I know the reasons for this, I understand that in linux everything is treated like a file — I just don’t care. If a hard drive icon shows up on my desktop I should be able to read from it and write to it. If I can’t, don’t show it to me. The idea that you have to MOUNT and UMOUNT something like a CD-ROM drive to read from it is beyond crazy. It’s socipathic. There’s no point to it. If you need to mount and umount in linux, make it transparent to the user. If you can’t make it transparent to the user, then you’re an incompetent programmer and you need to get a real job fixing parking meters or cleaning toilets.

[6] File permissions. This is intolerable. Look, linux has a long history of running on large computer systems, there are good historical reasons for su and blah blah blah, fine, but there should at least be two basic installs of linux. One in which you don’t have to jerk around with file permissions because you’re THE ONLY USER and another install in which you have the normal infuriating pointless linux file permissions and user/superuser hierarchy and all that headache. The headache stuff is necessary for a computer used by many people, or for a big network. Here’s a news flash: most computers in America are used by one person. Most people with a desktop box in their den do not run a network of 28,000 machines. In fact, I would venture to say that no people with a desktop box in their den _ever_ run a large network. So all this user permission crap is lethal. I got to the point with debian where every time I su’d to do anything I was getting asked my password. I would have to type in my passwrod 50, 70, 80 times a day. Enough. I don’t need that garbage. It’s like going into the kitchen with your wife and having her shout “Who are you? How did you get here?” That’s not an operating system, it’s Alzheimer’s. Within 3 days I got so sick of it I never wanted to see Debian again. Ever. Red Hat wasn’t any better. More su, more demands for my password. Then a couple of weeks went by and the ulimate betrayal, the ultimate slap in the face — I tried to log on and couldn’t remember my password. Here was MY computer in MY house refusing to let ME, the owner, log on. I wiped that linux distro. One thing I won’t tolerate is a machine that refuses to let me use it. Lawn mower doesn’t want to start? Throw it out. Get another one. Computer won’t let me log on? Wipe the hard disk, get another operating system.

The pimple-faced 14-year-olds will be out in force giggling over what a moron I am and how clueleess I am and how I’m not a 1337 haxx0r and a hopeless n00b and [fill in the infantile insult]. I don’t care. I know computers inside and out, I’ve been using ‘em since long before there was a Windows or there was a Mac OS, let alone a Mac OS X, and if I can’t get anywhere with linux, no one can. The linux people need to shape up and get some basic stuff done.

First, stop lying to the user. If a drive icon shows up, let ‘em read from the drive. That’s basic. if you click print, the goddamn document should print. Don’t lie to the user and tell the user you’re PRINTING and then not print. Second, the linux people have GOT to get a one-click application install working. That’s basic. You’ve already done that with linux installs. (I’m not talking about Gentoo here, Gentoo is an exception.) Red Hat has essentially a once click install. Debian is essentially a one-click install. Ubuntu is a one-click install. Puppy Linux is a zero-click install — Puppy Linux just works with nothing to configure! So if the linux people can do all that with something as complex as an OS install, they’ve G*O*T to be able to get a one-click application install going. It can’t be impossible. Windows does it, the Mac does it, for god’s sake even CP/M did it under GEM back in the day. You want to explain to me why linux is lagging behind CP/M? Third, stop frustrating and blocking the user. If a user needs to do something, don’t EVER give a message like YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO ACCESS THIS FILE. Goddammit, it’s my computer and I’m just trying to use it, what the hell’s your problem, linux? Fourth, ditch the command line except for exotic special circumstances. I really have to harp on this one. This bugs me. We got away from DOS allegedly because it was hard to use. I never found it that hard to use, but, the command line did have some big limitations. When it came to graphics programs or music programs or certain types of word processing functions like italicizing a big block of text, I learned to love a GUI in a hurry. Asking a user to go back to the year 1970 in order to use linux is unacceptable. We’re beyond that. Get rid of the command line, it’s over, done, stick a fork in it, the command line is toast. Fifth,

hide the mount and umount crap. I don’t want to deal with mounting anything, not even a horse. I don’t need it, and the OS should be smart enough to realize that if I click on a drive icon, I want to read it or write to it and the computer should do mount it or umount it automatically and transparently. Don’t give me a set of complicated and long-winded and incoherent reasons why you can’t do that. Other computers manage it. When I click on the D: hard drive in Windows, I can move files and read from ‘em, when I click on the MY HARD DRIVE icon in Mac OS, ditto. Why can’t linux do that? mount and umount is stupid, it’s pointless, get rid of this mount and umount garbage. And the last is the worst. For single-user dekstop computers there is NO REASON FOR FILE PERMISSIONS. At all. Period. Windows and Mac users and even old CP/M users back in the 1970s didn’t have to jack around with file permission crap. There should be an install on linux that gets rid of this time-wasting frustrating file permission insanity. When it’s a one-user computer on one desktop that’s not part of a big network, file permissions are demented and counterproductive. As a computer user in my own home, I never ever ever want to be told YOU DO NOT HAVE PERMISSION TO [do X]. When I get told that, I shut the computer down and wipe the hard drive and replace the OS with another operating system that doesn’t jerk me around and tell me I can’t do the things I need to do.

Linux has a lot of great features. But the 6 problems above made it unusable for me. Until linux fixes these basic problems, I’m never to go beyond Puppy Linux running from a CD or Knoppix booting off a CD, and those are toy hobby distros. They’re okay for surfing the net, but because you don’t have a big writeable disk with an active filesystem, you can’t do much.




09

07/05

Biology breaks Trends

02:53 by Nash. Filed under: All

As usual, biology has proven to be far more complex than one expects. One doesnt think the dark depths of the ocean could support anything but chemosynthesis…however :

Grow in the Dark: Bottom-dwelling bacterium survives on geothermal glow

A microbe discovered in the deepest, darkest reaches of the Pacific Ocean makes its living in an unlikely way—by photosynthesis. The newly described species, announced in the June 28 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, uses faint light emitted by deep-sea hydrothermal vents to power its metabolism.
Story here…

And if that isn’t interesting enough (!) :

Deep sea predator creates red light zone

A voracious relative of the jellyfish, which uses fluorescent red tentacles to entice prey to a stinging death, has been discovered deep in the ocean. The scarlet lures on this fragile predator suggests that red light, thought to be invisible to animals at these depths, may in fact be important in deep sea ecology.
“Researchers expect to see red light so little that they actually examine deep sea animals under red lamps. But that exposes and destroy the red visual pigments,” says co-author Casey Dunn at Yale University, New Haven, US. “Finding red lures really implies we need to take a much closer look at animals to see if they can see in the red.”

Read more



08

07/05

Surely, you’re joking, Mr.Feynman !

03:07 by Nash. Filed under: All

I’ve been reading the book by the Richard P. Feynman. And its a wierd book…because it moves from the laughable, to the insightful , to the abstract, to the human, to the philosophical side and to the scientific side of things almost as instantly as you can say “Poof”. (I don’t know why you’d say that, but its a short enough word to explain my point.)

Anyhow, before I talk about the book, I’ll talk about the man. Any physics chaps who come across this undoubtedly know and possibly worship his genius…but he was a lot more than a scientist : a drummer, a philanderer and a safecracker..in particular. :)


Richard Phillips Feynman (May 11, 1918 – February 15, 1988) (surname pronounced FINE-man; /ˈfaɪnmən/ in IPA) was one of the most influential American physicists of the 20th century, expanding greatly the theory of quantum electrodynamics. As well as being an inspiring lecturer and amateur musician, he helped in the development of the atomic bomb and was later a member of the panel which investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. For his work on quantum electrodynamics, Feynman was one of the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1965, along with Julian Schwinger and Sin-Itiro Tomonaga.

Feynman did much of his best work while at Caltech, including research in:

* Quantum electrodynamics. The theory for which Feynman won his Nobel Prize is known for its extremely accurate predictionsFeyQED,QEDsel. He helped develop a functional integral formulation of quantum mechanics, in which every possible path from one state to the next is considered, the final path being a sum over the possibilities.FeyQM

* Physics of the superfluidity of supercooled liquid helium, where helium seems to display a lack of viscosity when flowing. Applying the Schrödinger equation to the question showed that the superfluid was displaying quantum mechanical behavior observable on a macroscopic scale. This helped enormously with the problem of superconductivity.

* A model of weak decay, which showed that the current coupling in the process is a combination of vector and axial. (An example of weak decay is the decay of a neutron into an electron, a proton, and an anti-neutrino.) Although E.C. George Sudharsan and Robert Marshak developed the theory nearly simultaneously, Feynman’s collaboration with Murray Gell-Mann was seen as the seminal one, the theory was of massive importance, and the weak interaction was neatly described.

According to Professor Steven Frautschi, a colleague of Feynman, Feynman was the only person in the Altadena region to buy flood insurance after the massive 1978 fire, predicting correctly that the fire’s destruction would lead to land erosion, causing mudslides and flooding. The flood occurred in 1979 after winter rains and destroyed multiple houses in the neighborhood.

Feynman traveled a great deal, notably to Brazil, and near the end of his life schemed to visit the obscure Russian land of Tuva, a dream that, due to Cold War bureaucratic problems, never succeededLei91. During this period he discovered that he had a form of cancer, but, thanks to surgery, he managed to hold it off.

Feynman did not work only on physics, and had a large circle of friends from all walks of life, including the arts. He took up painting at one time and enjoyed some success under the pseudonym “Ofey”, culminating in an exhibition dedicated to his work. He learned to play drums (frigideira) in acceptable samba style in Brazil by persistence and practice, and participated in a samba “school”. Such actions earned him a reputation of eccentricity.

Feynman had very liberal views on sexuality and was not ashamed of admitting it. In Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!, he gives advice on the best way to pick up a girl in a hostess bar and drew a decoration for a massage parlor. His favorite place was nude/topless bars, which he used to visit six times a week. In addition, he admitted to being a cannabis user as well as having experimented with LSD and Ketamine. Feynman also enjoyed bike riding and being interviewed.

And now for a few quotations by him :

# “Physics is to math what sex is to masturbation.”
# “Physics is like sex: sure, it may give some practical results, but that’s not why we do it.”

And his last words : “I’d hate to die twice. It’s so boring.”

What others said about him :

* The “Feynman Problem Solving Algorithm”, as facetiously observed by a colleague, Murray Gell-Mann in the NY Times, was:

1. write down the problem;
2. think very hard;
3. write down the answer.

* The noted physicist E.P.Wigner described him as “He is second only to Dirac#. Only this time human”.

# referring to Paul Dirac , founder of the field of Quantum Physics


So what do you say, a man of many dimensions, dont you think ?



07

07/05

Mutation !!

17:36 by Nash. Filed under: All

On the TIFR website, a photo of Aditee and Sarada is found as follows :

You can check this link : Photo
or this one, to verify : Album

Last time I checked, Sarada looked like this :

Are you inhaling too many things in that lab , Sar?

PS : Yes, you’re right, I have nothing better to do.



01

07/05

Old Memories

02:19 by Nash. Filed under: All

Today , at night, I couldn’t sleep again, and so I started going through some of my old stuff. And look what I found :
In 1998, I was in Nairobi , Kenya. And the school took us on a trip to Mombasa (a coastal town in Kenya with a similar history to Mumbai) for the International Academic Olympics….a picture of us as we were leaving the hotel. I must say we were put up rather well ..the hotel was a 4-star place and had a private beach. And we arrived a couple of days before the Olympics…the train from Nairobi to Mombasa travels through a vast region called the “Tsaavo”, which is also a nature reserve…and that was an experience in itself. Although Kenya has only 4 major railway stations, the train service is much like it was when the British were here. So you have to go to dining coachs for breakfast, lunch and dinner and your bed is made when you come back….Anyhow, at the hotel we spent all day long alternating in the swimming pool and the sea…playing and drinking and eating….we were really having a great time. I got to know those chaps rather well …. even though they were much older than me … here is my team :)

From left to right : Front : John, Me, Nupur, Aliyah, Tamaswati, Raj, Mrs. Ndirangu, Dr.Cook, Mr. Mbete, Mr. Chadri (crouching). Back : Back row, I don’t remember any of their names…man o man. But then , I had met them only those few days.

By the way , this Dr.Cook was a linguist , he could speak 11 languages…European and African. And Mr. Chadri…he is the only person who could make chemistry interesting to me.

And what about the Academic Olympics? Well, we came in second. My job was to make a small car that was as frictionless as possible and would go furthest when released on a 1 metre 45deg incline. We won that event :) . But over all, we came second…cause our carbide-powered rocket blew up instead of going up like itwas supposed too…lol…

Beautiful memories!