Diwali Greeting

It is Diwali time. Brightness wins over Darkness.

Righteousness wins over Cheating. World needs peace and the message of Diwali is relevant today as it has been all these years.

Wishing you all a Happy Diwali. This picture is from my brother Mukesh.

Nobel Prize

US is on the lead for the Nobel Prize.
Chemistry they have it all. (though one scientist is from Japan)
Physics is shared between USA and Japan.
Medicine is shared between France and Germany.
Literature is French.

Peace and Economics are due on 10th and 13th October respectively.

I searched the site (www.nobelprize.org) to find the Indians or at-least those born in India who have won the prize.

Among the nominations Gandhiji, Nehruji and Sanjib Chaudhary (CJ Supreme Court) were nominated. Surprisingly Gandhiji never won the prize. It puzzles me to this day.

In 1913 Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore won for Literature.
In 1930 Sir Venkata Raman won the prize for Physics.
In 1968 Har Gobind Khurana for Medicine
(He took US Citizenship in 1970)
In 1979 Mother Teresa for Peace.
In 1983 Subramanya Chandrasekhar for Physics
(He became US Citizen in 1953)
In 1998 Amartya Sen for Economics

Bright Minds.

Trip to Ayuthaya.

Last Sunday, I decided to go to Ayuthaya. There are many ways to go there. But I decided to take the route that is taken by common people. A taxi would have cost any where near to 2000 Baht or more. And would be going-seeing-coming back.

I took the BTK train to Moh-Chit station. The train ride with good AC is really refreshing. Next I got down and took a bus number 77. I should add here that, one of the security personnel there was very helpful. He told me to take either 77 or 3, which will take me direct to the Bus Station. Any way, the bus ride was nice. It cost be 16 Baht. Once in the bus station, I took the Bus to Ayuthaya. It was again AC. Ride was nice, and in 90 mins I was there. Once in Ayuthaya, I took a motorcycle and went about seeing the place.

You can read some information on Ayuthaya here.
1. Amazing Thailand. Tourist Web site. (http://www.amazing-thailand.com/Ayuthaya.html)

I took many photos on my Casio-Exilim. But I am posting those I took on my Nokia 6300 camera phone.

Enjoy.








Peace in world.

Shoes

I had gone to buy shoes yesterday and wondered, that what is their history? Who wore the first shoes. Since when did shoes become a fashion from a necessity? What are the materials used to make them?
I my home town in Rajasthan, India, shoes are made of camel leather. They are quite different. We call them mojri. And during old times, the shoe or mojri as we call it, would eat into the legs. We had to oil it.

Mojri looked like this.



Picture has been borrowed from rediff. Also it is interesting to read the history of shoes here.

Smallest

I was surfing the net to find the world's smallest countries. I found a link here.
If you add up the population of the 17 countries listed here, it is still less than a medium sized Indian town. I am surprised how people feel and live in such small countries.
The link is here.



Next I started to look for the smallest people. I found a site about Primordial Dwarfism. It is essentially a rare case where people grow very slowly. Much better than me I think the video shows it all. I searched further and found this site. There was reference of an Indian there. This caught my attention. His name is Aditya "Romeo" Dev. He is a body builder and recognized as the smallest body builder both in Guinness and Limca book of records.

A picture is attached.