Outer Space and...flying....

Ever since I can remember, the universe has fascinated me. As a kid, I spent long minutes "contemplating" on the universe wondering about this apparently infinite expanse of space and I loved looking at different pictures of the universe in encyclopaedias. I learnt the names of the vegetables about the same time as I learnt the names of the planets - but the former didn't seem half as captivating (something I've mentioned elsewhere). After that initial burst of enthusiasm and the initial excitement of learning and seeing what I could about the bits and pieces - I've forever scratched my head about outer space. Now my fascination isn't what anyone would or could possibly call a scientific understanding. I would have loved to understand more of what they talk about these days - I really would - the physicists with their big bangs and the black holes and the point of the beginning or the moment of beginning. I've tried reading but little of it do I understand. Once upon a time, I fantasized about being an astrophysicist. And not one who just understood the physical and chemical properties of the universe. Oh no. Not a piddly one but a great one. I knew it was never going to happen so it was nice to fanatsize about. Anyway...

Outer space seems to be a world far, so far away from the here and now. And what I harbour for it is still a fascination mixed with a deep and silent awe. The thought of the universe sometimes trickles in when I'm sitting in a somewhat noisy coffee-shop working on something peculiarly mundane, over-hearing one young girl telling another that she's going out for dinner, a group of people talking about different matters, someone laughing softly, another noisy one talking loudly into his cell-phone, some sort of music playing in the background, people walking by the coffee-shop. In that sudden moment - time freezes. I look around and peer and stare and I wonder what it is that we humans are doing here. I can't help it. Sometimes I want to burst out with a laugh or a cry or a shout - "Look. Look at us. We're here. We're on a planet in a very modest solar system of this Milky Way, floating around in the Universe..." Of course I don't do anything. I just sit and peer and stare and go and look at whatever it is that I'm supposed to be looking at with a grim look of determination. Sometimes then I might think of a snowflake or something else, and smile. The breathtaking beauty and the grottiness and the staleness and the surreal - I don't know what to make of it all when I think about the universe and our world....How is it all possible? - for one thing ! One of the side-thoughts that my meagre mind sometimes wonders over is, what (on earth?) happens to those astronauts when they get "lost" in space... "And why should it be any different?" - My brighter self retorts. They end up the way any and all human beings do. But it must be different living and looking and breathing and dying in space somewhere. Being able to see the Earth as a "pale blue dot". Please watch this video with Carl Sagan's famous speech in the background. The sound on this one is a tad unclear though....I show it to my class every semester and the students are silent for some seconds after it is over.

Sometimes a strange emotion fills me when I hear of those scientists working and living and researching in the Antarctic and Arctic...they come up with these little news clips on the BBC every now and again. I don't know whether I've ever seen myself doing any of that - although when I first read about the great explorers of the early 20th century, in primary school, I did think that they had indeed been heroic. Once when a friend asked me, via e-mail, where I was and what I was doing I had told her that I was in Alaska (that's about as far North as I can see myself...). I also said that I was working on animal-human interactions (reindeer - what else) - or maybe I didn't but I told her that I was in one of the unusual places (not Fairbanks nor Anchorage). I got so absorbed in the telling of my tale that by the time I sent off my e-mail I honestly believed that I was in Alaska, roughing it out - and felt rather sad that I wasn't. I've never wanted to be an astronaut though. The idea of actually living in a tube with some 7 others and living in those smelly body suits for months on end - doesn't appeal to me now and never did.

But I rather like the idea of flying...and some minutes ago, while outside, I got a wistful little jolt after many months upon seeing one of those bi-planes flying low. I got wondering about Amelia Earhart, that rather amazing woman, who was a visiting prof/career counsellor at Purdue in the mid 1930s. In fact she was on a leave of absence from Purdue when she made her "final" flight in 1937. In the first semester that I was here, a friend, who also lived in the dorms with me, used to egg me on to take flying lessons because I would whoop every time I'd see those bi-planes flying low. The only thing that I didn't do was physically run "after" them. While these and some other aeroplane-related thoughts and images were swiveling around in the morning, a thought caught me by surprise. I really could join the Purdue flying school for some flying lessons. It may not be a bad thing to watch the Earth and be suspended in air somewhere while actually flying a plane....Don't know where I'll be next. We'll see...back to the real world for now.

P.S: A hundred thanks to google. I didn't even know about Matilde Moisant. She was born in Earl Park, Indiana, and she was flying around in 1911...Here's a link.

9/11/2010

Another Fall

Another Fall semester is going to begin from tomorrow, and I’ve been feeling somewhat nostalgic, in spite of my "cold, fratchy, and unfeeling self", and in sudden bursts (with Beethoven’s Ode to Joy playing in my head and Ami Keboli Swapano playing from my comp. every now and again) because I’m reminded of the first year that I came here. That’s the only time of my life that I feel happily nostalgic about sometimes. When I first came here and for some long months after.

There is no point in brooding over the past but giving a little time for the good memories does no harm. In fact letting in the good memories might even make one feel better and more hopeful about some of the good things that may come to pass still. And in the end – well, there will be an end. But in between there may yet be some good laughs and some bliss-filled times.

The first time I came here I was filled with an unearthly, trembling, delicious and divine hope. I was convinced that good things were going to be done by me. I can’t think of anything good that I did but one good thing, did happen. If anyone scoffs at miracles – I can shove one in his/her face.

It was 8 years ago that I first came here. Eight years is an awfully long time. Eight years in school in India would have been between classes 2-9. Yet sometimes it feels that only two years have gone by or maybe two and a half considering the things that I’ve done and not done and un-done. Calling myself stunted does no good – but it isn’t an entirely misplaced label. Last year I was convinced beyond doubt that I was going to be done here and get on with things. Now I’ve gotten alarmed about still being here.

I wonder whether time passes differently as we grow older or whether our perception of time changes. Does it slow down or does it speed up? I know in some ways, I now measure time by the seasons (and sometimes not too accurately) but that’s because the seasons are discernible. Otherwise there are only clumps of time in my head. In school, every day seemed different. Every day was a different day and I could remember what had happened a month ago or even two months ago. Now I remember nothing of some years and some other months seem to have been stretched out to cover large expanses of space in my head.

Wonder what this year will bring. Some good luck, like during that first year, would be nice along with some military discipline. A couple of laughs, here and there, might do no harm but I don't want to push luck too far.

I harbour the greatest admiration for writers who can write seamlessly, articulately and dispassionately even with billowing mushroom clouds in their heads...I’ve been reading in snatches, from here and there, and from very lovely pieces. Some lovely bits that I read in recent times come from a letter that Tagore wrote to Jagadish Chandra Bose – unstinting and unfettered in his admiration, praise and love, and unabashed in expecting nothing but Bose's love in return – and, another some bits from the many that he wrote to his wife. It’s one of those visceral experiences that makes one laugh sunnily for those minutes, no matter what else one is feeling. Come to think of it, more than a couple of the lovely bits that I've been reading are snatches from letters.

Do we change, I wonder. I don’t know whether I have changed very much. I like to think that I have in some ways. I have to say that for most things I can’t see how I’ve changed, and for other things I don’t see how I could not have. Not just in the last 8 years but from the time that I was 5 or thereabouts and through school and all…Sometimes I feel I haven't changed a whit and in other ways I feel like a different person to myself. Been putting the little scraps together in between this and that, which appear, in no rigid order, in the previous never-ending post.

Bye, for now. God bless...

Colours, Numbers, and Letters

They talk about people seeing 'things', normally neutral, in colour. This 'process'/'condition' is known as synesthesia (other connections are also made amongst things that are normally seen as being disconnected). Days of the week are always a particular colour and so are numbers (unless numbers are seen as characters), among other things. Some see these and other 'things' in colour. I was reading this and that and I was wondering whether all people possess the trait - like most things - to a lesser or greater degree. I have a feeling that this is one of those 'traits' that run along a continuum rather than existing as a binary (yes/no) trait/condition.

I don't see each day of the week as being a definite colour but some days are filled with a hazy or a lime-green air and other days are filled with a pale wispy mountain blue or a deep, dense blue. Some days are a shimmering and dazzling grey. Some days are grey puffy mushroom clouds - polluted and polluting and ravaged (or maybe it's me who is the walking smog-cloud?). Other days are filled with white light else I am the one immersed in an expanse of silent white light. Never had a rose coloured day although some days come across as greyish-pink and others as reddish and angry and bruised. There are pale lemon days with grey specks and some are lavender. Some sure are colourless. Sometimes washed out, sometimes translucent, and sometimes transparent and liquid (with or without colour).

Numbers aren't imbued with any specific colours in my mind but they do seem to be characters, and these don't shift but only 'grow' (as characters do). Double numbers are characters of their own. I won't go through all of the numbers (haha) but to take some -

7 is serious, quiet, brilliant and somewhat shy, and thoughtful and quick-witted, and given to a sudden somersault, and is boyish.

9 is a little like 7 here and there (...actually 9 is 7's elder brother), and has a temper and broods and is given to deep laughter ( '9' should never be written with a curvy end but should end in a long and straight line).

6 is graceful, fast, is musically gifted, and is a blithe spirit.

5 just sits there, and is slow, and lazy, and dreams too much and is rather pudding-y.

2 is alert and quietly bright, sometimes noisy and sometimes quiet and lonely in a corner near a window.

1 simply is - observant and smiling - either it's enlightened or high or maybe both...

and the 0 is as it should be - perplexing. It is everything or nothing or both or what? The 0 feels empty and feels full.

...Some of the numbers make faces.

Letters don't seem to have specific characters for me (nor are they filled with any colours) apart from the usual sharpness or 'curviness' or in-between-ness that comes with each letter - especially when hand-written and the colours of a day become blurred when I think too much of them. They seem clearer in the passing or in one sudden blast when I'm in the day. The numbers are the sharpest and remain constant in that sense, and have well-defined personalities and come with their quirks and manners and all. They remind me of people.

Each year is always set as it should be - in an *elliptical circle (*and sometimes like a horseshoe), and one travels around with it (and one is sometimes 'late' in 'placing oneself in the right spot) and the cusp between one year to the next is arranged like a spiral....there is a mini-leap between one year and the next and then begins another one and another one (*wonder what I saw when human beings believed in/followed the geocentric model). But take decades and they are stacked but stacked in shelves that slant downwards to the right (the centuries all merge in my head, I can't deal with centuries. No wonder I have difficulty remembering dates, I say). One's own age and that of others come arranged in neat columns.

There is, I'm sure, some sort of a nice story that has to be lurking around amongst these numbers and days and colours...but I can't find it. Not even with my poking forks and prodding prongs.

Talking of colours, I'm also reminded of that interesting experiment on coordination where you have one colour written in another colour. So for instance - for the following list one has to rattle off the actual colours and not the words that are spelt out.

GREEN,

YELLOW,

WHITE,

BLACK,

PINK,

GREY,

ORANGE ...

It's not impossible but one does trip. It's apparently to do with one part (of the brain) being more involved with reading (and all our linguistic abilities) and one part being involved with visual perception.....