Category: Personal

  • The Chathurthi Celebrations This Year

    Mumbai and Maharashtra celebrate the Ganesh festival every year with great zest. This year the focus has been on eco-friendly celebrations –

    1. Symbolic immersions of house hold idols. Before the time they became community events nearly 75 years ago, the home made Gamesh idols were immersed in water in home ponds, kept there for some time before placing it back in the house. These have been revived as a way of not polluting water sources elsewhere in the city.

    2. Making of clay models of Ganapatis which are said to dissolve faster than the currently used plaster of paris ones.

    3. Lalbaug Ganapati mandal (the organisation which manages the festival at Lalbaug) are going for carbon credits to offset their carbon emissions.

    4. Purchase of idols from organisations such as NASEOH (National Society for Equal Oppertunities for the Handicapped)

    5. Reviving traditions of Maharashtra among school children by organising plays, fancy dress competitions etc. These are better ways to spread Marathi culture, which once you’re acquainted with are really great to read about.

    6. Lesser noise and sensible use of loud speakers. There’s been really less noise compared to last year. The sensible noise pollution rules have been well implemented this year.

    7. Pestom Sagar Citizen’s Forum converting waste PoP into bricks

    Bal Gangadhar Tilak, the man who started these celebrations to bring unity among Indians against British rule is hopefully proud of such socially and ecologically aware celebrations. Next year, I hope organisers will take the next step in preserving and representing the culture so that it is preserved for generations –

    1. Video recordings of gatherings,activities etc.

    2. maps on Google or Yahoo! on locations of Ganapati mandals. 

    3. sharing photos on sites like Picasa and Flickr and even integrating it with maps.

    4. records of electricity used and decibels recorded for looking at possible ways to save electricity.

    These are just pointers. I hope that much more is done to try and integrate and save traditional practises through modern medias.

  • Su-Do-Ku on trains

    One of the recent past times I’ve started doing is Su-Do-Kus. Very ancient now and most of the fads have gone but it is still a good refreshing mental exercise to undertake during your morning commute to college. I do three Su-Do-Kus a day, just for fun. 

  • Floods in Nepal and India – Google’s dedicated pages

    If anyone was planning to watch on the latest in the flood situation in eastern India and Nepal, they can log on to the specially prepared Google page.

  • A Day of Rest

    The whole of last week was spent in writing about and preparing for the Telescopes of India tour. I have got a wonderful response to my initial post both on the blog as well as via email. I thought I’d take a well-deserved break and do some personal stuff.

    I was thinking back to my early days (when I was about 12 years old) I made an imaginary country of which I took over as President called Helix. I got the name from an old geometry box my dad brought me. I had filled up two notebooks worth of paper with various drawings, maps, city plans and what not. Yeah, even had a list of Kings and Presidents from 23 BC. My country is supposed to have started in 23 BC. That came mostly because my room no at the time was 23. BC sounded lot cooler to a 12-year-old than AD. So, that’s when the country started.

    I remember I even designed the capital city. I probably lost the stuff while moving homes. It’d have been great to put such designs online and see if anyone thought it worth anything.

    If you’re curious the capital city was called Hellington.

  • The PRADX Project

    Many of you may have wondered how this ‘Pradx’ came into existence. Clearing out some of the junk, I find that an earlier explanation for it turned out to be wrong. The earlier explanation was that it came as a result of my online names – everything had a prad and then changed into something else (-eep, 2609 etc.). Therefore the x was more like a variable that could be changed to add some new thing and formed the basis of a good url. This explanation is partly true.

    However, this has a deeper root than that. I started coming online only when I was 18 and my first email id was ‘jneeskans’ which pretty much tells you why that explanation doesn’t hold true. It seems that at round about the age of 18 – September, 2004 if you have a thing for precision – I started a small self-improvement project that I labelled the Pradx Project. It was a set of experiments that I could do with myself. The Pradx Project envisaged me engaging online, reading tons of books on philosophy, engaging in sports and a series of what I would now call DIY projects. For the age at which I started this project, it was pretty neat and well thought out. It included elaborate timelines, list of people who could help me with stuff, saving patterns to help me raise funds for the DIY projects, a lot of notes about books I could refer to on Philosophy and even setting out an exercise plan for me to follow until I could grow down from my 85 kgs to the prescribed 76 kgs. In short, it was well thought out. It was secretive and even had the following inscription on the first page –

    The Pradx Project
    Top Secret. Do not go to the next page unless you know I’m dead.

    The reason why I’m telling you this is because I’m going to destroy all of that stuff and I thought an overall entry about it here would be fitting before I put it to rest. It’s a pretty comprehensive document with quite elaborate writings on where I wanted to be and where I was. It pretty much took up a long book of about 200 pages. The darn thing even had footnotes and margin notes. It seems to be revised twice (it’s a practise that I saw in online open source projects that I loved). As of now, I know that it was too ambitious to have been attempted at that time. Heck, its even ambitious now.

    The reason why that project fizzled out was because of lack of money and a stupid understanding of where I was. I spent most of the money on the Net and some of it buying books on Philosophy (The Tao of Physics, Commentaries on Living, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintainence, The Space Within the Heart).

    But, I like the idea of a Project for self-improvement. It kinda rocks. So, I’m going to restart it 3 years since it was buried in the archives.

    Today is Day 0. The chief idea is cleaning up the stuff that I don’t want now. It’s an idea that’s based on the GTD techniques. But, after that I leave that road and travel on something totally different and perhaps even radical. A weekly post on the Pradx Project can be expected from now on. I am not going to buy a notebook for it this time. Else all I will do is write about the project and not actually do it. The stress is on doing and not writing about doing.

  • High School Reunion

    After about 6 years out of high school, we had our first high school reunion yesterday. I was waiting in anticipation of this event and like in so many previous events, I was totally mum when I actually went there. I think it’s been proved enough times to give a name to it like “Pradeep’s Syndrome” and then actually put it all in a notebook and maybe even apply to patent that name. I’m famous, at last! Every human being’s secret dream!

    Pradeep’s Syndrome can be characterised by extreme preparation for a particular event and then staying so silent at the event that everyone thinks that I lost my capacity to speak.

    Some of the reunion photos are up on Facebook. Me being not so rich enough to afford even a camera phone am happy seeing these second hand records of history. Well, if any of my school mates are reading this: It was nice to have met you and hope we can be silent together when we meet again. Enjoy and all the best.

  • Blog Move

    Just for anyone who didn’t catch this earlier. I have moved to a domain of my own. More trouble for me, I know.

    Here are the RSS feeds for posts and comments  –

    Posts – http://www.pradx.org/feed/

    Feeds – http://www.pradx.org/comments/feed/

    Hope to see you there!

  • I’m on WordPress.org

    It seems my life changes almost every second for either the best or the worst.

    I’m now on my own domain name – pradx.org – thanks to Anbarasan, a guy I’ve known for about a year or so now!

    1. Pradeep’s Blog – link – RSS feed

    2. Wiki – link

  • From WordPress to Blogger

    I’m moving over to Blogger – http://pradx.blogspot.com

    You have to change the RSS feeds to – http://pradx.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

    To the WordPress community: It’s been a great 3 years blogging here and I’m not going away anywhere. Once I have the time and resources to setup my own website, I will definitely opt for a WordPress blog.  Now, I just need to have access to more features than WordPress allows me and I want lesser passwords/user ids to remember.

    Goodbye!This blog and related accounts will be deleted in1 year!!

  • A visit to my grandma’s friend and 60 year old mechanical texts

    I went to meet my grandparents after a long week this Sunday (16/03). My grandma told me about her friend, whose husband died recently after being afflicted with Alzheimers. He was a draftsman and a mechanical engineer from the late 1940s- early 1950s. He had some books that the wife wanted to pass on to other students if it was useful to them or give it away as scrap. Was I interested in taking a look at the books? Sure!

    When we got there she was still in the process of handling the legal formalities of her husband’s death. The legal death of a person takes longer, perhaps than the physical death of a person.

    She brought out the books from a shelf and laid it on the table for me to look. I fished out these books that I mention below and also a set of study materials from the International Home Studies and various society booklets.

    1. Machinery’s Hand Book (for Machine Shop and Drafting Room), The Industrial Press, New York(sole distributors for the British Empire) – 1944 (cost mentioned – Rs. 33)
    2. Theoretical Mechanics – S. Targ – Foriegn Languages Publishing House, Moscow – Rs. 4.25
    3. Applied Mechanics for Engineers – J. Duncan – MacMillan & Co., London – 1949
    4. Applied Mechanics – David Allan Low – Longmans Green & Co., London – 1913 (there was no other date – I’m not sure if it was the co establishment date or the publication date)
    5. Machine Design Construction and Drawing (Book Production War Economy Standards) – Henry J Spooner – Longmans Green & Co, London – 1944
    6. Workshop Technology I (Book Production War Economy Standards) – W A J Chapman – Edward Arnold & Co. – 1945

    It is at times like these that I kick myself mentally for not having a digital camera or a phone camera. The books mentioned above despite the years were well maintained. It’s more probably because of better publication practises than because of better maintainence methods. She also showed me a tyre her husband had designed for Firestone Tyres, the company her husband had worked for. She also showed me the table top calendar that she had made for her husband with day, date, month and year.

    Also, for 60 year old textbooks, most of the content there could be as well used for my own course today with very little change.