Why Sri Lanka ?

Sri Lanka was a soft target.

An in-depth opinion-piece (not news) article on why Sri Lanka was probably chosen for the Easter attacks.

Marvellous Nonsense

Ill be very glad when this is over. The new Marvel movie is hitting theatres this week. Endgame. Fans are going crazy around the world. Fans are speculating non-stop. Fans are frustrated. Because fans cannot get enough tickets.

But I have never been a fan. Of these superhero movies.

For me , there is something weird seeing grown men wearing spandex and capes and cosplaying. And I am talking of the fans here. Its even worse seeing the actors playing these 'comics' on screen. Sure, they are getting paid hundreds of milllions for standing in front of green screens. But it is still weird seeing all this hype about superhero movies.

And now I see people discussing scenes and dialogues from the movies as if they were the classic movies from the fifties. Makes me puke, when I see them discuss charachter arcs and emotional vulnerabilites.

Its also amazing seeing the marvellous marketting machinery of hollywood at work. They are able to get crazy fans pay through their noses for first day tickets for these CGI-action movies, when movies with real stories, inspiring and memorable characters lie in the dust. They just don't make those kind of fun movies anymore.

Its also amazing when you realize that real superheroes don't really wear capes. I see them everyday. They were uniforms, and hats, and are always around to protect and serve.

Just get this over with. Until they think of the next superhero movie they can write up.

Unhealthy country

I have been binge watching the second season of 'Laakhon mein Ek' on Prime over the long weekend. Never knew about it. Don't care about the first season. Its one of those new millenial online docu-drama series. This one places a young, extremely positive, and a little out-of-touch young student of medicine in the middle of a political imbroglio. I was hoping for a happy ending. Alas, like anything else Indian , this one too does not have any.

The sad reality is that the story in this series can never be tagged historic. It will be contemporary , even about 50 years from now. By the way things are going, hardly anything is going to improve. Therefore one can't say that the timing of such a story is relevant. Any Indian will be able to relate to this story, anytime.

Students of medicine in India have to undergo what is called 'rural service'. After 5 years of theory, and 1 year of internship, they have to serve 1 or 2 years working at remote hospitals or health centres deep inside Indian villages. Sometimes these places are in or near reserved forests, or up in the hilss, with no easy access or communication with the outside world. It is the exact opposite of a plush seat job, in an air conditioned clinic. The education is considered complete only after completion of this service, and is required to secure the degree. And this way, the system ensures that there is always a steady stream of young healthy energetic young doctors standing by to serve the section of population who are in most need of dependable health care.

The students hate it. The administration struggles with it. But milllions depend on it.

I have met my share of shady quacks and doctors deep in Indian villages. Have been very fortunate to escape the system. With the government providing the medicine, and them providing the hospitals and doctors, one would think it would all go along swimmingly. One could not be more wrong. The system corrupts everyone involved. And the patients are most affected.

Its pathetic. And there are thousands of stories of people trying to fight the system. Legally and otherwise.

And this is one of those attempts.

Happy Vishu. Happy Easter. And remember the fallen.

Happy Vishu. Happy Easter.

Its always fascinating when these two days coincide, celebrating different events from different communities. Theres more than one reason to rejoice.

This year, we will also take time to remember those soldiers who died protecting the good in this world. So that we could enjoy it.

These are good days.

Seeing a Black hole

These are exciting times ! Scientists have presented the first-ever image of a black hole.

The data for this image was captured in 2017, but ti took the agency 2 years to transport and process the data to generate the image. A network of 8 radio telescopes in different countries , including the south pole, captured information simultaneoulsy, and the data itself was transported on hard drives. The data captured was radiowave imaging, so there was no colour. They chose a bright orange color just to look good.

The image shows the shadow of the black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, a massive galaxy in the Virgo galaxy cluster 55 million light-years away. Its mass is 6.5 billion times that of the Sun. It took a worldwide collaboration of telescopes, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT), in order to find it.

This is not really a “picture” of a black hole, and the shadow does not denote the black hole’s event horizon. Instead, you’re seeing the effects of gravity on the radio waves emitted from matter surrounding the black hole in a slightly larger region around the black hole’s event horizon. Gravity warps the shape of spacetime itself, deflecting some of the light in the region and generating an eerie circular shadow.

But it’s a groundbreaking observation, and another important proof of the theory of gravity that physicists use as a guide to the universe, Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity.

Black holes have long served as a theoretical exercise. But astronomical observations in the past 60 years have increasingly demonstrated that there are objects in the Universe whose gravitational field is so intense that it warps spacetime such that light cannot escape beyond a point of no return, called the event horizon. Thanks to a world-side collaboration, is the closest image ever taken to the event horizon itself, near-direct evidence of the black hole’s existence.

Black holes as a theory are a consequence of trying to solve the equations of Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity for a spherical, non-rotating system. However, it was the work of physicist David Ritz Finkelstein in 1958 that determined what black holes would look like in space: points of no return for light. We already had lots of indirect evidence of black holes’ existence—we’ve seen gravitational waves, predicted perfectly by mass turned into energy after the utterly inconceivable collision between a pair of black holes each a few dozen times the mass of the Sun. We’ve seen jets of particles spew forth from galactic centres that are far more energetic than those that come from collisions at our highest-energy physics experiment, the Large Hadron Collider. Technically, the EHT data is indirect evidence as well, but it’s about as close to direct evidence as we’ve had thus far.

It all started with Einstein. And Hawking.