Thursday, October 11, 2007

ARCHITECTURE WITH ARCHITECTS - IUCAA

IUCAA, known as Inter-University Center for Astronomy and Astrophysics, represents model of cosmos. It is situated in pune.
The building itself is very perfect for its purpose.

We can see the playful nature of building as soon as we march towards it. it has three main courtyards flanked by the various functions and two main roads passing toward its periphery which marks the importance of this building.

Both the entrance of the building is very dramatic, which is unique. The entrance, through which we entered, was flanked by double layer of wall supporting the dome at its top symbolizing entrance. This dome was painted black from within, representing black sky of night with many punctures of different sizes which allowed the flow of light through the point marking the exact positions of stars in pune on a particular day.

On moving further, we were now part of a huge courtyard with many different elements representing the expanding universe (the big bang), and many stone blocks scattered along the diagonal of the courtyard, starting from formal to informal organization. This stone blocks, were asteroids scattered in space resulted from to the big bang. The matter of over scale of courtyard with respect to the building was intelligently solved by placing blown up sculptures in scale to courtyard scale.

The courtyard is surrounded by Research Labs marked by the sculpture of Aryabhatta (who more than ten centuries ago, established that our planet was round), Library marked by the sculpture of Newton (sitting under a tree looking at fallen apple), Domed entrance marked by the sculpture of Galelio (gesturing up to the dome of heaven) and Classrooms marked by the sculpture of Einstine (time in his watch, contemplating the relativity of space).

All the colors use inside and outside the building was chosen from the shades found from the elements of our Space and the Milky Way.

Second entrance which is exactly opposite in direction to first one is marked by two concrete pillars and the three layered atone cladded wall, which merges with the clear sky at the top.

We also got to know, while process of construction, Charles use to sit with many scientists and researchers from Bangalore for hours discussing various aspects about the nature which resulted in this wonderful creation. I could realize the amount of pain the architects must have undergone while working on this project to give it an identity.




The picture to the left is Foucault's Pendulum

in the Faculty Office, which proves that earth

revolves around its own axis.



LIFE AT CCA

























READ THIS, YOU WILL LOVE IT.

Awesome! B_O_M_B_A_Y


Bombay has no bombs and is a harbour not a bay.

Churchgate has neither a church nor a gate. It is a railway station.

There is no darkness in Andheri.

Lalbaag is neither red nor a garden.

No king ever stayed at Kings Circle .

Nor did Queen Victoria stay at Victoria Terminus.

Nor is there any princess at Princess Street .

Lower Parel is at the same level as Parel

There are no marines or sailors at Marine Lines.

The Mahalaxmi temple is at Haji Ali not at Mahalaxmi.

There are no pigs traded at Dukar bazaar.

Teen bati is a junction of 3 roads, not three lamps.

Trams used to terminate at Kings circle not Dadar* Tram Terminus (Dadar T.T.).

Breach Candy is not a sweetmeat market, but there is a Hospital.

Safed Pool has the dirtiest and blackest water.

You cannot buy coal at Kolsa street.

There are no Iron smiths at Lohar chawl.

There are no pot makers at Kumbhar wada.

Lokhandwala complex is not an Iron and steel market.

Null bazaar does not sell taps.

You will not find ladyfingers at Bheendi Bazaar.

Kalachowki does not have a black Police station.

Hanging Gardens are not suspended.

Mirchi Gully does not sell chillies.

Figs do not grow in Anjir Wadi.

Sitafals do not grow in Sitafal Wadi,

Jackfruits do not grow at Fanaswadi.

But it is true that you may get fleeced at Chor Bazaar!

AMCHI MUMBAIA City where everything is possible, especially the impossible . Where lovers first love and then marry,
Where there is place for every Tom, Dick and Harry,
Where telephone bills make a person ill,
Where a person cannot sleep without a pill.
Where carbon-dioxide is more than oxygen,
Where the road is considered to be a dustbin,
Where college canteens are full and classes empty,
Where Adam teasing is also making an entry,
Where a cycle reaches faster than a car,
Where everyone thinks himself to be a star,
Where sky scrapers overlook the slum,
Where houses collapse as the monsoon comes,
Where people first act and then think,
Where there is more water in the pen than ink,
Where the roads see-saw in monsoon,
Where the beggars become rich soon,
Where the roads are levelled when the minister arrives,
Where college admission means hard cash,
Where cement is frequently mixed with ash.
This is Mumbai my dear, But don't fear, just cheer, come to Mumbai every year!


THINGS TO PROVE YOU'RE A BOMBAYITE

1. You say "town " and expect everyone to know that this means south of Churchgate.
2 You speak in a dialect of Hindi called 'Bambaiya Hindi', which only Bombayites can understand.
3. Your door has more than three locks.
4. Rs 500 worth of groceries fit in one paper bag.
5. Train timings (9.27, 10.49 etc) are really important events of life.
6. You spend more time each month traveling than you spend at home.
7. You call an 8' x 10' clustered room a Hall.
8. You're paying Rs 10,000 for a 1 room flat, the size of walk-in closet and you think it's a "steal."
9. You have the following sets of friend: school friends, college friends, neighborhood friends,
office friends and yes, train friends, a species unique only in Bombay.
10. Cabbies and bus conductors think you are from Mars if you call the roads by their Indian name,
they are more familiar with Warden Road, Peddar  Road, Altamount Road ...
11. Stock market quotes are the only other thing* besides cricket which you follow passionately. 12. The first thing that you read in the Times of India is the " Bombay Times" supplement.
13. You take fashion seriously. You're suspicious of strangers who are actually nice to you.
14. Hookers, beggars and the homeless are invisible.
15. You compare Bombay to New York 's Manhattan instead of any other cities of India.
16. The most frequently used part of your car is the horn.
17. You insist on calling CST as VT, and Sahar andSantacruz airports instead of Chatrapati Shivaji International Airport.
18. You consider eye contact an act of overt aggression.
19. Your idea of personal space is no one actually standing on your toes.
20. Being truly alone makes you nervous.
21. You love wading through knee deep mucky water in the monsoons, and actually call it ''romantic'.
22. Only in Bombay , you would get Chinese Dosa and Jain Chicken.

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005

Stanford Report, June 14, 2005
'You've got to find what you love,' Jobs says


This is the text of the Commencement address by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005.
I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
The first story is about connecting the dots.
I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?
It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: "We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?" They said: "Of course." My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.
And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.
It wasn't all romantic. I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.
Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.
I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down - that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle.
My third story is about death.
When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:
No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.
Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960's, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.
Thank you all very much.

MY BIRTHDAY AT CCA

IT WAS 4th JULY, AMERICAS INDEPENDENT DAY AND OF COURSE MY BIRTHDAY, WHICH I REMEMBER WAS ONE OF MY BEST BIRTHDAY, WITH ALL MY OFFICE MATES.
I HAD NEVER IMAGINED SUCH A GREAT DAY, 4 JULY WILL BE SO FUN AND PARTYING. THE FACT THAT IT WAS CELEBRATED AT CHARLES OFFICE JUST ADDED UP MORE AMBIENCE TO THE DAY.


IT WAS ALMOND CHOCLATE CAKE, VERY TEMPTING, THOUGH I DONT LIKE SWEET THINGS. SO TIME DID NOT STOP IN CAKE CUTTING.


THEN ALL MY OFFICE MATES HANDS WERE FULL OF LOADS OF CHOCLATE CAKE, READY TO BATHE ME UP WITH IT.
NOT ALL OF IT WAS WASTED, WE ALSO ATE SOME OF IT....







SEE ALL OF THEM LOOK SO INOCENT, BUT BELIEVE ME, THEY ARE THE DONS.....






THN IT WAS MR CORREAS. FOLLOWER, MR MANAS AND ONE OF MY BEST FRIEND, WHO ENDED MY BIRTHDAY SESSION, EATING THE LAST PIECE OF CAKE.







Wednesday, October 10, 2007