Inspiring Indians

“Inspiring Indians” – this should have been the title of my first blog! Anyways, even now it is not late.

Being an Indian is something really great! Indians have reached great heights in almost all fields and it feels very nice to type that here. A democratic and a secular country, one of the fastest growing economies, and above all, the country with so many people to encourage and inspire the present generation!

Here, I would just like to mention about a few people who have inspired me in many ways. So, here we go….

1. Dr. A.P.J. Abdul Kalam

Simplicity, humble in thought and noble in action! I am very particular on listening to his speeches, especially to the student community. “Rameshwaram to Rashtrapathi Bhavan” – a must read biography! Who would forget his words – “Dream dream and dream and make your dreams come true!” Salutes!

2. Mahakavi Subramanya Bharathiyar

An Indian then a poet or a poet then an Indian? Ask this to him. Even he would not know the correct answer. (And this has become the topic for most of the Tamil debates…) “I know what I do is right, it is all for mother India”, his typical words. Even after 88 years of his death, he lives in everyone’s heart. Salutes!

3. Mr. Narendra Modi

Longest serving chief minister of Gujarat, Mr. Modi is also the best chief minister among all CMs of India. Indeed a role model for other politicians. His views on compulsory voting in elections, non-free electricity for farmers etc. are fantastic. I love the way he addresses his opponents. Salutes!

4. Dr. R.D.Sharma

Most of the engineering students forget his name after stepping into college. But for sure, they would have used his unmatched books on Mathematics in school life. I have not even seen his face on a photo, but I can tell you, this maths genius’ way of presenting different concepts on different topics is too good. I just loved the problems from his text book. It would be incomplete, if I do not mention his qualification for you to know – B.Sc. (Honors) (Gold Medalist), M.Sc. (Gold Medalist), Ph.D.!!!! Salutes!

5. Bagavath Ramanujar

A great philosopher, teacher, scholar, therapist and what not! For winning over the previous vedantha philosophies namely the Dwaita and the Adwaita to produce the third one with special qualities of both and removing the errors from them and composing the Bhashyam for “Visishta” Advaitham! The best role model for any man on this earth! Salutes!

P.S. :- Though the personalities have been listen from 1 to 5, I give equal respect and seek inspiration from everyone to the same extent !

Wishing all a very happy new year! Wishing to see India in great heights this year! Jai Hind!

- ∫.∫rikrishnan

A TERRA BYTE memory!

I was promised an external hard disk of memory space 1 TB by my father days ago. I was too happy about it and I even started planning how to create partitions in it to store movies, songs and my college files’ backups. 1 TB is actually more than enough for me but each time I see 1 TB as 1024 GB, I get excited and when I see each GB as 1024 Mb I still get excited.

As the saying goes “necessity is the mother of invention”, we required devices to store memory so that the task of remembering most of the things could be avoided. And after necessity, it got modified on its own to luxury. I say this because, we now use hard disks not only to store important information, but also for less important information like movies, games etc.

And we now have changed so much, that we now depend entirely on these memory storage devices, and any failure or a problem in retrieving data from it would irk us a lot! We even have the facility of “reminders” on mobile phones which make us lazier. “Laziness to remember things”! And is it for this reason that humans have been given a great amount of memory space in brain??

A quote from some researchers:

"The human brain contains about 50 billion to 200 billion neurons (nobody knows how many for sure), each of which interfaces with 1,000 to 100,000 other neurons through 100 trillion (10^14) to 10 quadrillion (10^16) synaptic junctions. Each synapse possesses a variable firing threshold which is reduced as the neuron is repeatedly activated. If we assume that the firing threshold at each synapse can assume 256 distinguishable levels, and if we suppose that there are 20,000 shared synapses per neuron (10,000 per neuron), then the total information storage capacity of the synapses in the cortex would be of the order of 500 to 1,000 terabytes. (Of course, if the brain's storage of information takes place at a molecular level, then I would be afraid to hazard a guess regarding how many bytes can be stored in the brain. One estimate has placed it at about 3.6 X 10^19 bytes.)"

It is the human tendency to do away with all that one has, and search for the non-available ones! Man must understand that it is absolutely impossible to compete with nature. All his inventions have their roots with nature. Seeing a bird, he invented the aero plane, seeing a human, he invented the robot, seeing a caterpillar he invented the train and so on…

Such inventions may look amazing, but the real appreciation must go only to nature!!!

Cheers :)

- ∫.∫rikrishnan