Redefining Horizons

Which is the highest mountain in the world?  Mount Everest? Which is the biggest desert in the world?  Sahara? If you thought those were correct answers, you are wrong.  Difficult to digest?   You are not the only one. When I asked this question to people, almost everybody answered it as   Mount Everest and Sahara. Some even showed books that say Mount Everest is the highest or tallest mountain and Sahara is the largest desert. The tech-savvy immediately took refuge in the web and got caught in it. I also got full marks for the same answer in my general knowledge tests in school. Both the answers are wrong. They are wrong by 1.36 kilometers in height and 5,000,000 square kilometers in area. Mount Everest is the highest point above “mean sea level.” It touches a height of 29,029 feet above mean sea level. It is the highest point on earth. It still does not mean it is the highest mountain in the world. Mauna Kea volcano, which stands a mere 13,800 feet a...

  I was sitting at the back of the class and playing book cricket. Our Physics teacher was working hard on explaining the Venturi effect. “Remember! Energy is neither created nor lost. It gets converted from one state to the other,” he said. “No loss, no gain,” I found the concept interesting.    Book cricket was my fiefdom. I made rules and decided when to start and finish the match. “Time for a drink break,” I told the cricketers, closed the book pitch, and gave all my ears to the teacher. “So, when the water in a pipeline comes across a choke point, the pressure inside the tube at the choke increases, and the velocity decreases. The moment it comes out of the choke, the pressure falls dramatically, and the speed of the water increases correspondingly. People designing the layout of long-distance pipelines incorporate it to install inline flow meters. It also makes sure that pipelines do not get clogged,” he said. Intuition told me it would be a sure question in the exa...

  Endless Efforts   “Callification?” Your efforts to find out what it means in the dictionary shall go in vain. I just made it up.  Patiently read through it; you will know what it means.     The three submersible pumps working continuously and in tandem could not fill the colony’s overhead tank. The employees kept the pump running. One pump ran dry far too long and burned itself out. The open well also ran dry. They told no one. Why should they? They had nothing to lose. I noticed the unusual activity and enquired. This had been going on for a few days. It should not have.   I did a quick calculation of the flow rates of the pumps, the capacity of the community tank, and the tanks over the individual houses. Considering the endless efforts of the pumps, all the overhead tanks should have been filled and overflowing. It did not happen. I concluded that there must be a leak somewhere in the pipeline. The large amount of water that leaked ...

  Child Smoker  The car was a beast from the outside but a cocoon from the inside. The unending leg space and silent air conditioning inside made it ideal for friends to travel and talk. The endless roads, devoid of traffic, encouraged the car to race with the winds. Whenever Jose, my friend, forgot to rein in the beast, Cini, his wife, lovingly reminded him of the brake pedal. Jose and I are childhood friends.   “Do you know how we first met?” Jose asked my wife as we headed for Khor Fakkan from Al Dahaid. I tried hard to recollect but failed. “Something interesting about it?” she asked. Jose had already narrated many incidents of our childhood since we arrived in Sharjah two days ago. We had been laughing at ourselves and reconnecting. There were times when we laughed till our stomachs hurt. “Like all houses in the locality, our houses were farmhouses and shared a common boundary, a high mud bund we call Kayyaala . It was one of the few kayyaalas in the local...

  Ubiquitous Affliction “Sanu ki,”  a usage in Punjabi, is both a phrase and an idiom. “Sanu” translates to “us” and “ki” means “what.” Together, it merely means “to us, what” or in other words “why bother?” Simply put it means “I don't care.” That is where it stops being a phrase. Depending upon the context, “sanu ki?” assumes many a meaning. Commencing from being a plain expression indicating disassociation, it can mean anything like irrelevance, irreverence, scorn, and at times the sublime state of acceptance of the inevitable. One needs to spend time with people who speak Punjabi to capture the essence of the “sanu ki” served. It can mean anything depending on how, when, and where it has been said and to whom it has been delivered.  The difference in tone can change the associated meaning. The versatility of this phrase or idiom is what caught my attention. In Malayalam, my mother tongue, there are different versions of ‘sanu ki?” Starting from “ namukku enth...

       “ Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The Evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones  So let it be with Caesar. ”   These lines came to me just out of the blue and with it, the name of Mr JS Iyer, one of my teachers.  Act 3, Scene 2 of the Shakespearean play, Julius Caesar reverberates on stages the world over as the play itself or as part of elocution competitions in many schools and colleges. These lines did not mean anything to me beyond the next examination, those days. Strange, these lines had to come up while I was sitting in my study taking stock of life. I had just published my second book, "Dare Dream Different." With that, I checked off the 8 th of the 10 “things to do before I die,” a second time. I had drawn up that list in 1988. The paper on which the list was written could not stand its age and one day when I opened it to read, it just disint...