A beautiful coincidence

Some coincidences are just beautiful, like this one. Few days back in an article, I had mentioned Dharmavir Bharti, one of my favourite poets' name. Of course, the spell-check program was unable to identify it and instead suggested to use the word Dreamweaver.

This was a wonderful suggestion indeed. After all, this is precisely what he did throughout his life, and in fact one of his books is titled Sapna abhi bhi!

Buy Erdős numbers!

While doing random surfing today, I came across this interesting information on Wikipedia:

• On April 20, 2004 Bill Tozier, a researcher with Erdős number 4, offered the chance for collaboration to attain an Erdős number 5 in an auction on eBay. The final bid was $1,031.

• Another eBay auction offered an Erdős number of 2 for a prospective paper to be submitted for publication to Chance (a magazine of the American Statistical Association) about skill in the World Series of Poker and the World Poker Tour. It closed on 22 July 2004 with a winning bid of $127.40. This is noteworthy because with the exception of a few co-authored articles to be published posthumously, 2 is the minimum number that can now be achieved.

For the full article see this page.

A great chance for my ex-officemate to earn money!

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Copied from a Wikipedia article under "copyleft" License of GNU Free Documentation.

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Some crazy thoughts

Today, that I have completed 10000 days since I was born, I am compelled to look back and think. The increment of digits, in some sense, is a rare phenomenon. Last time when it happened, I was too young to realise it, and next time, I won't be anymore in this world.

A question comes to my mind - "Isn't it too monotonous to be with one single person, me myself, for 10000 days?" Then I realise that the real me is an accumulation of so many people I have come across so far, and that's what fills so many colours in life. It was only my body with me all the time, but so many diversities within were picked from everyone around. So where is the question of monotony?

Idli-Dosa

Disclaimer: Reading this post may lead head injuries or may spoil your day. This innocent blogger is not responsible for any damage caused.

Question:
What did Idli tell to Dosa?

Hint:

(i) Answer is not simple... may be it's Dimple then... or pimple?

(ii) From (i), you are unlikely to deduce the answer unless you know (iii).
(iii) It resembles a Hindi film song.

Answer:

To know the answer select the (hidden) text with your mouse from here --> "sambhar kinare dil ye pukare, tu jo nahi to mera koi nahi hai" <-- to here.

Sorry for the post!

On his birthday

Almost a century ago on this day, Faiz Ahmed Faiz (@LOC, @Wiki) was born. I often regret for getting introduced to him very late in my life (another one such is Dharmavir Bharti). His piece of work which I came across first made me one of his everlasting fans. It was a poem called Nauha, which he wrote on the death of his brother. Such a wonderful and rare, yet so natural imagination. I immediately typed it in Devanagari and took a print out.


Sometimes I wonder, had he more words in his treasure or more feelings? In every poem of him, I find new words and untouched feelings. Ye daag daag ujala he wrote during partition applies equally to both sides of the border. His words reached a wider class of audience through the voice of Iqbal Bano, Tina Sani, Nayyara Noor and others. While listening Bahaar aayi, Bol ke lab, Hum dekhenge, Raat yoon dil mein, you realise the existence of Faiz somewhere around.

My tributes to him on the day when he would have completed 95 years of life, had he been alive.

Saraswati Puja

It was a pleasant surprise to know that people here celebrate Saraswati Puja on a large scale. People with their origin in different parts of the world gather and celebrate this festival together. Last Sunday was puja day and I was there.



Apart from puja in the morning, there were cultural programmes in the evening. A very different and great experience in deed. A very homely feeling too, though we do not celebrate puja at our home!

Where are we going?

I was excited to see a Hindi Newspaper online along with e-paper - exact replica of the print version. These things make one nostalgic when away from home. I was amazed to see Sunday's Kids' Corner section. I remember, to grab these pages first, we used to fight. But then, it was a shock to follow. There was an article for kids on Internet Safety, in which a typical sentence reads like:

Where are we heading to? Do we want to tell next generation that Hindi/Urdu words like prayog/istemaal, saavdhaani, maata-pita etc., are too strange to be used by the "educated" (or those who have got computers at their home)? Who will be responsible if we loose these words from the language after 20 years?

It's a pity that the whole Kids' section was like that. Computers, Mobiles, Video Games blah, blah... no Cheeku, Tinni, haathi, sher, khargosh. Why do we want to kill their imagination and take away some beautiful words from their own tongue?

An upcoming model

The weather is coldest in my life and I find it difficult to believe that I can walk in 'minus'! The lake in the town has frozen and no surprise that I am excited about it. This made me take a round of the lake and click whatever I could. I was amazed to see this reflection from the ice.


And then another bird was kind enough to pose for me. First she demonstrated her cat-walk (bird-walk should I say?).


Then she invited me to take this picture of her:


I should say she has got all the characteristics of an upcoming model. But I am not in this kind of business and thus keeping my policy of neutrality, I can only say "Thanda matlab... lake frozen"!

The roots forgotten

Human beings have thousands of ways to express themselves, after all there are thousands of spoken languages in the world. It's interesting to know how these languages evolved. Unfortunately, no one knows the exact answer and to trace the roots, one can only make guesses by looking at the grammar and words.

One of the first instances when I observed similarity in the words of English and Hindi was actually a doha by Kabir in school syllabus:

nindak niyare raakhiye, aangan kuTi chhabaay |
bin paani saabun bina, nirmal kare subhaay ||

(you should be surrounded by your critics for they will clean you without water and soap)

Here the word niyare stands for vicinity or nearness. And that's what surprised me. Later on, in my syllabus itself I learnt that in Russian, fire is called agni.

Another interesting word I have investigated in several languages is Potato, which is Patata in Italian and Spanish, Patates in Turkish and Potatis in Swedish, but more interestingly (not surprisingly though) Batata in Marathi as well as Portuguese! How did aaloo come then? This made me search the net and I found that it came from Sanskrit (read this post, completely devoted to aaloo).

Observe that all the languages mentioned above belong, by and large, to Indo-European family and most linguists agree on the way languages have been classified into families. So what surprised me is a similarity between a word in Hindi/Urdu and Moré, a West African language. In Turkish and Moré, which belongs to the family entirely different from Indo-European, world is called duniyaa! How come? I don't know.

Times changed, people moved from here to there, carried some words with them and left some. The process continued and languages kept getting new shapes. "Apni marzi se kahaan apne safar ke hum hain"...... and so are the languages!