We can view waves as energy in motion for example Sound, Radio and Light.
Sound waves in fluids such as air and water are the easiest to understand.
As lucidly explained by Professor Richard Feynman and Professor H.J. Pain in their classic textbooks, the phenomena of sound can be visualised as consisting of three initial steps:
We can think of the situation in which we have a long column of air with a cross-sectional area of unity and which consist of small elemental volumes neighbouring each other.
1. The fluid moves in the first elemental volume and changes the density.
2. The changes in density lead to a change in pressure.
3. Change in pressure leads to movement in the neighbouring elemental volume.
And the cycle repeats with the movement being passed on to the third elemental volume and so on..
There was a Reader’s Digest publication named ‘How to Live with Life’. I found it to be very inspiring because it contained articles by great persons like Albert Einstein and James Michener. For me, that book was medicine for a battered soul, so much so that, after having derived great benefit from practicing the main lessons brought out in that book, I gave it away to a friend whom I found to be in psychological discomfort, because I imagined the book would help him as much as it had helped me and work like a tried and tested medicine. Almost 40 years have gone by, but I could not replace that book in my collection for ready reference and revision. Now, on reflection, I feel there are some of its lessons I should share with everyone, as I have found them to be very effective.
There are two articles in that book which I recall: ‘Never Stop Learning’ by James Michener, and another called ‘Take a Holiday from Caution’.
The article by James Michener was one that started with World War II and the huge recruitment drive by the US military at that time. Three prospective aspirants appeared before the selection committee. James Michener was the first to be interviewed.
“What are your accomplishments and skills, young man?” barked the Sergeant.
“Sir,” replied Michener, “I have graduated in the English letters. In the later part of my course, the faculty called me and my classmates and said: ‘Dear students, we have decided not to take any lectures on conventional subjects. Our instructions to you are to define and pursue your own academic goals. At the end of the year, we will examine you on the results of your efforts and decide whether to give you a Bachelor of Arts degree.’ I chose the ‘Art of the Novel’ as my personal pursuit and could see a pattern in how novels have been written.”
“Next!” yelled the Sergeant, and then in stepped a law graduate.
“What have you done? What have you got to offer your country?” asked the recruiter.
“I have studied the basics of many areas in the legal domain. This facilitates the smooth functioning of all kinds of relationships: domestic, international, commercial, medical…”
He too was rejected. Then the third candidate entered, expanded his chest and asserted, “I can overhaul diesel engines.”
“You are our man,” said the soldier. “You are hired.”
Michener then writes about where the three men were after the war ended: he himself became a famous writer, winning the Pulitzer Prize for his book ‘Tales of the South Pacific’; the lawyer had become the chief legal adviser to the commander of NATO; and the third man was still overhauling diesel engines…
I recall that the second article, ‘Take a Holiday from Caution’, mentioned, “If you look too long, you will never leap.” That was another lesson…
In my experience, healing through reading, i.e. bibliotherapy, is the most effective. Even Mahatma Gandhi read the Bhagavad Gita to beat the blues. Millions have found solace by reading the Holy Bible, the Quran, the words of Ramana Maharshi, Guru Nanak and the Buddha, and the timeless life lessons to be read and practiced from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography and the essay ‘The Way to Wealth’ given in it, as well as from the written and spoken words of philosophers like Alan Watts and writers like Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale and Kalidas. The list is limited by my ignorance…
They were a young family of four,
And like us they were guests at Hotel Prospect Panchgani, where we had been, to our good fortune, many times before.
They were seated at a table adjacent to ours,
With a baby girl in an elevated stool with a strap, and her parents and elder brother aged the sum of two fours.
The baby started crying and howling in discomfort and hunger.
When the father got up and, unstrapping her, lifted her into his arms,
Then slowly put her down when her crying had soothed,
And began feeding her with tiny spoonfuls.
It was then the brother got up:
“I’ll help you, Papa,” he said.
And lovingly to his little sister a few more spoonfuls he fed.
There was genuine love and care in his eyes and his touch,
And the baby brightened up, with a bright broad affectionate smile
that was filled with love, much more than very, very much.
Every first born thus care to the second very caringly does give,
Who in turn reciprocates with love, and a family thus joyously does live.
It was around 1998 when our entire family ventured out from Ahmedabad to Mount Abu in our white Fiat DIC 7705.
We carried food, had a book of maps and iced water in a 5 litre ‘Kool Keg’.
My son Manu was around 11 years old and daughter Bhavya 13. The car was really a primitive one, but had become over the years, an extension of our feet and the pivot of my attention with eyes ahead & on the rearview mirror; the ears tuned to the rear.
Driving does become like playing tennis, mostly a subconscious activity with the car being navigated and controlled through the action of the reflexes, tempered as they are with all our previous experiences.
We climbed up the hill and the engine heated up. We stopped next to a spring, but it was dry, and we badly needed water to cool the engine.
“Babba” (father) said my dear son Manu,
“We have water in the Kool Keg”. “Okay son “, I answered with a sense of relief and hope, “Will you pour water down the radiator as I rev up the engine?”. I had managed to keep the car in neutral and stationary by placing stones behind the rear wheels, because our handbrakes rarely worked.
“Yes, Babba”, said my son, as he gradually poured water in the radiator while I throttled up the engine. The cool water was evenly circulated by the water pump around the engine in its jacket, and this brought down the temperature needle from red to green.
After an hour or so, we were in Mount Abu. Those days I always compared all hill stations we visited to Nainital, (where we had spent our childhood) and never found them to be up to the mark. Now I don’t. I’m happy anywhere in God’s wide world. All of it is beautiful.
After checking in at a hotel, I browsed the telephone directory to see if there was anyone in town from my large number of friends and relations. And I soon found the name of a Wing Commander who happened to be my maternal aunt’s son.
We called him, met his family and saw the 16-bit computer he had brought from a study visit to the United Kingdom. He took us in his Maruti Gypsy to a temple near a hilltop where our old Fiat would not have been able to reach.
Thank you, dear family, for such empowering memories and all these great digitally controlled cars we have since owned.
But I will never tire of telling tales of journeys on our Fiat accompanied by love songs of Kishore Kumar, Mohammed Rafi, Lata Mangeshkar, Mukesh and Asha Bhosle playing shakingly in a loosely fitted assembled cassette car stereo, operated deftly by my wife Jaishri because at times the tape got entangled in the pinch roller. We carried food, printed maps, a full fuel tank, a 5 Litre ‘Kool Keg’ and prayer books. We were always rewarded with feelings of the pure joy of traveling to fine places and sometimes getting to meet loved ones and old friends, in what is a small world.
It is amazing how burnout and meltdowns in machines can be prevented by cooling systems and lubrication and those in relationships by love, children, music and motion.
This is a tale of elders three,
One 86-year-old gardener, a paralyzed railway retiree,
and a very old woman who by a lonely road sold tea.
Mali ji, as a gardener in Hindi, respectfully addressed,
Used to wake up early in his village near
Panchgani, walk up to a bus stand,
take a ride and the final two kilometers
briskly march ahead.
To Hotel Prospect where for more than sixty
years he had worked,
Watering lovely roses and dozens of other
colorful blooms he had tenderly
over the years nurtured.
A toothless smile, along with some flowers for our
balcony at home, he would always give us.
Till we noticed last time that the plants
were alone.
On enquiring we were told he was
admitted to a hospital but had
been discharged.
Though he was paralyzed in his lips & his
complaints could not be heard.
That he was not recognizing his near &
dear,
But was managing to perform his acts on
his own, an almost irreversible change in him was making
itself clear.
It so happened when from Panchgani
to Pune we were driving down,
We prayed at an ancient Shiva temple
Which was away from the town.
And as we descended to the
main road below,
At a bus stop was standing with his
old wife, steadfastly with love that
was very deep not shallow.
Mali ji recognized us and his wife gave us
a smile,
With cataract visible in her ageing eyes
with hope in them for their visit to the
government hospital which younger
folks thought futile.
May all find comfort in their last
days.
And be healthy, active and joyful as always.
The second old man in our Society
Pebbles Urbania, does stay.
I and my friend Vinay Kumta
met him in the garden’s walkway.
That was a year back and the
man’s spirits were battered & low,
Because he had suffered a stroke,
bitterness had gripped him and of an affordable medical remedy
he was not in the know.
Vinay convinced him that he must
thank his lucky star,
That the stroke hit him after he retired,
with the children all settled with
all his liabilities left behind,
in the past very far.
As a medicine a very expensive,
one he had been told,
And a Railway medical reimbursement was
not practicable, not something
he could hold.
Vinay told him of Jan Aushadhi where
affordable generic medicines could be had,
Soon after, in a few months, the
gentleman was better & no longer sad.
For one he was sleeping well and managing to slowly walk and in our Society garden
with the installed machines exercise, thus beat the blues in a manner
which if not very good was not too bad.
The third was an old lady
who in a lonely mountain
highway south of Mahabaleshwar
had opened a tea stall,
She made her fare on a wood based
chulha, the fuel
being collected from the
surrounding forest, fallen
branches of trees which were neither too big nor too small.
Maybe 4 buses and a few trucks
halted at her outlet during the
day,
Giving her enough profit to live on
with a resolve to continue
till her end which was not
far so to say.
When we returned after our
drive in the evening the lady
was closing her shop and was
walking uphill to her home
in a village which was
a kilometer away.
These details were revealed by
Mangesh who drives our car
whenever in Panchgani we
stay.
Thus, we elders who are not so old,
Can draw inspiration from these three who are much older, active and bold.
It’s a small world but not so much.
Over history since the emergence of homo sapiens men and women have been influenced by Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Taoism, Christianity and Marxism. All of them except Marxism are based on God but nevertheless they have all been initiated by persons and thought systems spelt out in written or spoken words.
Hinduism has the Upanishads,Vedas, Ramayan, the Mahabharata with the holy Geeta embedded in it. Buddhism has the Dhampada and the words of the Buddha, Taoism has the words of Lao Tse, Judaism the Old Testament, Christianity the Bible and the words of Jesus, Islam has the Prophet and the Holy Quran, the Sikhs have the Granth Sahib and modern Hinduism the revivalist works of Kambar and Tulsidas.
We see that all these are consisting of words: a facility enjoyed by humans for converting thoughts and ideas into a communicable form. Even communism and Marxism propagated the works of Karl Marx namely ‘The communist manifesto’ and ‘Das capital’.
Capitalism though not a religion is a thought system based on the work ‘The wealth of nations’, written by Adam Smith.These thought systems evolved in different eras and parts of the globe.
Exclusivity was presented in many of these idea banks and much of humanity followed only the faiths they were born in, though personal experience and the faculty of reading has enabled a large part of the world to appreciate or follow many of these …isms together.
As illustrated by Dr Siddharth Mukherjee in his pathbreaking book ‘The Gene’, psychiatric problems are accompanied by genius; they come and exist together. Amongst others, he cites the example of the co-inventor of the bipolar junction transistor, Dr William Shockley who was known to be paranoid and aggressive at times.
The transistor was the starting point of miniaturisation in electronics: radio, TV, computers, vehicular and medical instrumentation and control etc, almost every thing that let loose a distinct advantage to humanity and which when used with discretion led to greater health and prosperity, of and in the earth.
The transistor was a semiconductor device which was developed both as an amplifier and a switch, opening up denser applications of both continuous time analog electronics and discrete time digital electronics.
Any space whether it be a room, railway compartment a country or province; a territory has in it the potential of being fought over by animals, plants, microorganisms and even, or should we say more so by humans.
When I was a teenage student at Pilani my late elder brother dispatched me to Lucknow where my father who we called Baba was posted as the Conservator of Forests (Research and Development Circle). This was because Baba had returned from Romania after attending an international poplar conference and had brought for each of us a ‘Raketa’ watch and a terylene shirt and I was to go to collect them.The journey, usually an unreserved one was full of uncertainties, comprising of going for 6 hours by bus to Kashmiri Gate Interstate Bus Terminus at Delhi, followed by auto rickshaw to the old Delhi railway station and further by overnight train to Lucknow. We used to carry our baggage in steel trunks.
Now an unreserved 3rd class compartment had no grills in the windows. A coolie charged ₹10 for prying it up when it was opened slightly and pushing the trunk in against the strong physical resistance by the passengers who were already packed in the compartment. He then pushed me in through the window and as soon as I had entered I joined the other passengers in not letting a new entry from succeeding in crowding the compartment further.
I was reminded of this territorial instinct when I read in the newspaper recently that an Indian origin Britisher who is highly placed in the government had, now that she is in with a citizenship, joined the popular chorus discouraging others from gaining that great local advantage; understandably from the point of view of crowding of space, their economic concerns and comfort.
Nature ordained that man and all species of animals and plants be subject to competition. Aggression is thus most intense within members of the same species.
Humankind though is blessed with volition that can ensure peace in a world victimised by instincts (which have not yet evolved beyond primitive animal behaviour) to the level of love, kindness, security, health, happiness and prosperity which modern science, technology and enterprise makes possible for all.
There are warring factions in every mind and it is there we have to firstly seek peace through prayer, forgiveness, gratitude, surrender, self-acceptance, selflessness and hope, taming the animal in us with wisdom, experience and intuition..
As winter recedes and spring draws near,
We have to enjoy and spread happiness in the present and not live in the past or the future.
Let us recall and relive only pleasant memories, switching off those which make it difficult to cope,
And always look forward to the future with optimism and hope.