The Cosmic Web

Every day, every moment, someone or the other wishes for something, prays for something; or someone. The individual feels elated when his/her wish or prayer is heeded and, quite understandably, is surrounded by an air of disappointment if his desire is not fulfilled. But the point is, where all these wishes and prayers go? A widely accepted spiritual notion is that all these wishes diffuse into energy and become a part of the never ending cosmos. All of us know and agree upon the fact that energy can neither be created nor be destroyed. So all these wishes and prayers, in the form of energy, remain in the cosmos, waiting to be listened to, sometime or the other. The cosmos is a limitless reservoir in which these endless wishes wobble around.

There is always a set of rational thinkers who tend to disagree with such spiritual notions. Many of them might be reading this piece at the moment. Through this article, the author is not trying to convince those souls about the validity of this notion. Rather, the idea is to establish an analogy between the Cosmos and the World Wide Web.

The web, especially after the advent of Web 2.0, is a totally different playground. It is no longer a place where one checks in to get some information, data and records, send some emails, and then checks out. It’s a much different; a much better mesh today. It is now a place where you and i can contribute – through blogs, microblogs like twitter, social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Orkut – and that too in a number of ways. A means of contribution is our wishes and prayers. Readers who are regular users of the above mentioned services would have come across such wishful ‘updates’ from other users many times. To quote an example, in the recent past, the author, in his pursuit of an invite to join Google Wave, has expressed his wishes on his twitter page many times as in I want #google #wave. Can anyone plz send me an invite. Also, there are personal as well as more general prayers posted by users. Some are like Pray for my brother. Today he tested positive for H1N1. God help him. while some others sound like Pray for ManU. Arsenal is posing a big threat to them tonight.

These wishes and prayers, emerging from the thoughts of users, transform to words and finally to chunks of electrical energy in the form of 0s and 1s before becoming a part of the Cloud, called the Internet. Then they float about in the web, uninterrupted, before someone interested stumbles upon them. Then it is up to the stumbler to either reply or simply ignore them.

When the author receives comments on his blog post published months back, his conviction in this analogy, that someday his wishes, floating about in the cosmos, will be heeded, is further strengthened. That’s what he believes is the power of the Cosmic Web.

Fire

Fire

Many regard it as the earliest and one of the greatest invention of man along with the wheel. The invention of fire was the turning point in the history of human civilization. All of us use fire, in one or the other form in our lives, every single day. This usage is not restricted to merely the chemical phenomena, but has numerous other disambiguations. Let’s explore it in detail.

Chemically, fire is the rapid oxidation of a combustible substance to produce heat, light and other reaction products. A combustible substance, oxygen, a chain reaction and the required kindling temperature is what is required for a fire to start. These are collectively referred to as the fire tetrahedron. Extinguishing a fire requires the removal of any one of the above four requisites.

The Gujarat riots

The real life is not as simple as the chemical phenomena described above. In this world, a lot more other than the above four constituents of the tetrahedron are required to start a fire and even more is necessary to extinguish one. The communal fire that started in Kashmir and Punjab during the 1947 partition was fuelled by dirty political ambitions and the greed for power of some of the political brains back then. Since then, the fire has spread to other parts of this country and all attempts made to extinguish it have proved to be futile. The Godhra Train burning incident and the following riots in Gujarat were an extension of the same fire. Such violence and riots are symbolised by scenes of fire in every corner of the street as well as by sounds of gun fire. Gun fire is a synonym for death. It is an indication of war; of scenes of profusely bleeding men and women running helter-skelter for their lives and sometimes, in the process, achieving immortality, like the hundreds of martyrs of the infamous Jalliawalah Bagh massacre of 1919.

The Amar Jawan Jyoti at India Gate

But gun fire is not always so horrifying and deadly. A few months back, a few accurate fires from the gun of Abhinav Bindra won India her first ever individual gold medal in the Olympics while those from the gun of Rajyavardhan Singh Rathore had already given India a silver about four years ago. The flame of the fire of the Olympic torch bore a testimony to the achievements of these great sons of the soil. Lighting fire like the Amar Jawan Jyoti at Delhi is a means to pay homage to our valiant soldiers who dedicate their lives to the nation fighting enemy gun fire to guard our country’s borders.

Fire created controversy in many parts of India

No Hindu marriage is complete without fire

Fire is an integral part of many of the ancient cultures, notably the Greek, Roman, Chinese and our Indian culture. It is one of the five basic elements that make up the human life and it is the fire within a person that determines his/her passion for anything and everything that s/he does in life. Fire is also linked to the sexual energy possessed by a person. The Shabana Azmi and Nandita Das starring lesbian themed 1996 movie was hence aptly named Fire by Deepa Mehta. This is also one of the possible explanations of the usage of the adjective hot for the sexually attractive ones. For Hindus, no religious custom is complete without fire. All sacrifices are made to Agni or fire as it is considered as the messenger of other gods.

Fire - the IM Client for Mac OS X

In commercial organisations, fire is used in a totally different context. No employee would ever like to face the disgrace of getting fired by his/her employer. There have been exceptional examples like the current CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs who, after getting fired from Apple, used this energy from that fire to reignite his passion for his work and get back his position and status. I wonder if Fire – the first Instant Messaging client for Mac OS X that could access IRC, Jabber, AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo! Messenger and Bonjour – had any such similar history behind its name!

I was a bit busy with my college activities for the past few days so couldn’t blog anything but now that i’m free, i’m back to business as usual and hope that every reader likes my writings and very soon this blog spreads like wildfire on the web.

Merry Christmas

On this very auspicious occasion, i wish Merry Christmas to all the readers. 25^th of December is wordwide celebrated as Christmas – the birthday of Jesus, the son of God. Billions of people around the world eagerly wait for this day and as i write, are celebrating the holy day – the birth of Jesus Christ. But before i proceed with my blog, let me throw some light on the life and name of the divine person referenced above – Jesus Christ.

As the legend in the New Testament goes, Jesus was a shepherd who was born of a virgin, the Virgin Mary, in Bethlehem on 25^th of December. He had 12 disciples with whom he went about to different places delivering sermons, leading people to right paths in their lives and performing miracles. He was later crucified to death. After three days he resurrected and went to heaven.

So where does ‘Christ’ fit in here? Christ, meaning the anointed one (origin: Greek Khristos), is actually just a title which was given to Jesus as a mark of respect for his miraculous deeds. In the time period around 1 AD, the assumed life period of Jesus, there are historical records of about 20-25 contemporary historians like Aulus Perseus (60 AD), Livy (59 BC – 17 AD), Pliny the Elder (23 AD – 69 AD), Plutarch (46 AD – 119 AD), Valerius Flaccus (1^st Century AD), among others. In their writings, we all expect to get a detailed historical account of Jesus’ life and works. But quite shockingly, not even a single one of them mentions any historical figure like Jesus living around at that time!

There are more than thousands of evidences which prove that not only the life of Jesus but the entire Christian religion originated and is totally based on political ambitions of some of the power hungry people in Europe who gave this world the establishments like the Church and a forged historical account like the Bible which do every bit to ensure people trap themselves in the shackles of religious slavery. According to Thomas Paine (1737-1809), “The Christian religion is a parody on the worship of the sun, in which they put a man called Christ in the place of the sun, and pay him the adoration actually paid to the sun.”

I am not being religiously prejudiced. In fact, every religion of the world and the associated customs, whether in Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, Buddhism, you name it; are nothing more than a means of ensuring political domination by a certain sect of people who know that what they ‘preach’ is nothing more than a farce. A famous saying goes thus, “Religion can never reform mankind, because religion is slavery.” I do not condemn any saying or preaching of Christianity or any other religion. I am just trying to be rational as i support the idea of getting moral liberation through religious beliefs and practices, and not get forced or indulge in religious slavery. I reiterate, i believe that all religious sayings and customs are correct and true, only when they do not force people into religious slavery.

I also do not condemn celebrating December the 25^th as Christmas Day. Christmas is the day to celebrate the life of Christ – the anointed one, not necessarily the life of a mythical figure called Jesus! We need to celebrate Christmas as the life of the person who made a true impact on the lives of each and every one of us, born on this very date – Sir Isaac Newton.

Sir Isaac Newton, or Newton as we love to call him, was born in the year 1642^* on December the 25^th. One need not be a rocket scientist to know the impact of Newton’s life on this world. No one was particularly surprised when the History Channel named Newton as the second most influential person of the past millenium after Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press. The works of Newton in the varied fields of Mechanics, Mathematics, Optics and even Alchemy helped in solving many of the mysteries of life. The ongoing works in the fields of astronomy and space exploration are a gift of Newton’s genius to this world. There is no doubt in my mind that Newton was the real ‘anointed one’, the real Christ, not Jesus.

So let’s celebrate Christmas. Let’s celebrate the life of Christ – the anointed one………….. the anointed one that is Newton!

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Note: I sincerely apologise for hurting the religious feelings of the reader but on pondering for long on the topic, i realised that this is what the truth is. Merry Christmas!

All feelings expressed are my own. Quotations and historical evidences referenced from the Part I: The Greatest Story Ever Told of the documentary movie Zeitgeist (http://www.zeitgeistmovie.com/, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1166827/, wikipedia).

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^*According to the Julian calender, put in place by Julius Caesar in 45 BC, Newton was born on December 25, 1642. But according to the Gregorian Calender, the one in use today, his birth date is roughly around January 4, 1643.