Khan, Who?!

Seems like Shahrukh Khan was shocked by the fact that those officers could not recognize him. I mean, how audacious of them that he could not recognize THE King Khan of Bollywood?!!

Shahrukh Khan needs to know that he may be the uncrowned King of Bollywood but for the rest of the world, he is just one of the millions of strangers that arrive at their port of entry every year. The officer was only doing his honest job of scrutinizing him based on whatever intelligence that is available in their system. What is at stake is the security of their nation. Maybe the officers at our port of entry are not that diligent. That does not mean you have the same expectation of carelessness from the security personnel in other parts of the world.

Nuclear Deal - Part 2

No Hollywood movie is complete without a sequel. True to the spirit of its Hollywood, US has unleashed the second part of the nuclear deal with India. It was so very predictable that the deal was not an end in itself. It was a means to achieve some other ends.

It all started with the G-8 summit, where the US raised its tone and tenor to prohibit non-NPT nations from being supplied nuclear technology. This ran sharply against the things agreed upon in the Nuclear deal, or at least what Indian Government made the people believe about the deal.

Then came the dialogue between the Pakistani and Indian PM at Sharm-El-Sheikh, Egypt. That, by signing the nuclear deal, India would be made subservient to the US interests, was a foregone conclusion but little did we know that the Indian PM will stoop so low, so soon. The pressure from the western forces, to come up with a joint declaration was so very visible. Terrorism of its worst kind has been unleashed upon India and it is no secret as to where its master-minds are located. Yet, the composite dialogue between India and Pakistan is to be decoupled from terrorism. So may we ask, what are all the future composite dialogues going to discuss about? Kashmir Issue and weather. And as a filler, they will discuss Balochistan terrorism.

Not surprisingly, after the joint declaration, US reassured India that the G-8 statement had no bearing upon the 123-agreement.

If the faux pas at Sharm-El-Sheikh was not enough, close on the heels came the End User Monitoring Agreement (EUMA) with USA. Thanks to this agreement, the Phirangs will be seen snooping at our defense locations smelling/spying for all the confidential information that any sovereign nation should not be sharing with another nation.

All of this makes it so very obvious that the 123-agreement was just a sales pitch to sell to Indian masses, something that runs contrary to its strategic interests. This was Part-1. The second part starts now. The US will exert all kind of pressures on India. I suspect I know the climax of this part. Very soon the Indian government will sign the CTBT and the NPT, thereby putting to an end, whatever remained of India's strategic nuclear interest.

Sonia Gandhi Budget !

There may have been a lot of people surprised or shocked with the projected 6.8% Fiscal Deficit in the Budget Year 09-10. I for one, am not. The budget reflects exactly, the mandate received by the Congress in the Lok Sabha Elections 2009. The mandate is to talk not of economic liberalization, disinvestment of PSUs, etc. The mandate is to follow the leftist stance that the Nehru-Gandhi family always represented. To this extent, this is not a Manmohan Singh budget. This is a Sonia Gandhi budget.

Social Sector spending obviously was expected to escalate. We are back to pre-1991 era. The fiscal deficit is not going to be a concern for the government. The government will continue to be the biggest borrower of money. All that one can hope is that the money laid out for the intended improvement in the standard of living of rural India does not go down the drain, as it has in the past.

Meanwhile, the biggest casualty is the Fiscal Responsibility and Budget Management Act (FRBM). The goverrnment is going to just pay lip service to FRBM and continue with its extravaganza. Expect the Bond Yields to shoot up. Those who are long on dollars - continue to do so. The rupee should be devaluing even further.

The Tale of Two Monuments..

Two interesting developments happened last week. A marvellous piece of engineering and hard-work resulted in the Bandra Worli Link Bridge. Another marvellous piece of construction and art resulted in the spectacular statues of Ambedkar, Mayawati, Kanshiram and the BSP elephant!

The bridge has now been opened for vehicular traffic. This bridge took a pretty long time, lot of sweat and blood of thousands of labourers and huge cost overruns to eventually complete after 10 years and $325 Million. Despite the cost and the painful wait, at last we have something in which India and Mumbai can take pride. The immediate beneficiaries are the people of Mumbai. Along with the other such projects put together, it is expected that there should be considerable amount of traffic decongestion.


Talking about the other marvellous piece of design and artistic work in the Mayawati statues - as per the latest estimates the tall statues of the equally "tall" personalities come at a cost of about Rs.2000 Crores! A little bit of scribble-pad calculations, assuming Rs.50 to a dollar leads me to the conclusion that the bridge in Mumbai costs somewhere around Rs. 1600 Crores. Thus the monumental statues in Uttar Pradesh beat the bridge by a whopping Rs.400 Crores. No prize for guessing which one is a bigger monumental achievement! Besides, the statues are a great piece of art-work. I mean, look at the statue of Mayawati. The compassion and empathy in the eyes of the lady's statue is in sharp contrast to the villainous body language of the real lady. Whosoever has designed the statues has done a commendable and a challenging job!


So how do the two structures plan to recover their respective costs? We are told that the toll for the bridge is going to be Rs.50 one-way. There are going to be monthly passes as well. As per estimates about 100,000 vehicles are going to use the bridge, daily. Again, going back to my handie-dandie notepad, my calculations suggest the bridge will break-even with its fixed cost in about 10 years.

There is no estimate on how UP plans to recover the costs of those statues. In the absence of any known methods of recovering the costs, here are a few suggestions I would like to make. A statue is no good unless there are those people who answer the nature's call at the foot of the statues. So lets put a toll of say, Rs. 100 on those who are in a state of urgency and need to use the statue. We can also introduce monthly passes and life-memberships! Also, there can be tolls for those romeos and juliets who have to scribble their names and graffities on the statues. You have some interesting suggestions to make? Go ahead and make comments to this article. If the suggestions are good enough I shall use all the channels available to me for reaching out to Behen Mayawatiji and give the list of all the valueable suggestions to her.

The King of Pop is no more

Michael Joseph Jackson (August 29, 1958 – June 25, 2009)

For all of us who have grown up watching him perform, this comes as a piece of shock. His controversies notewithstanding, he remains one of those icons who have inspired an entire generation, throughout the world. Be it his songs or his famous moon-walking. Everything about Michael Jackson was emulated by the youngsters.

I am sure, in his death, he will be remembered as much as he was when alive.

Time to ponder over some missing links our school Physics text-books did not talk about..

So you know the quintessential force that exerts between two point masses (M1, M2) separated by a distance d. Do you? Lets see..

What is the speed with which the information from mass M1 propagates to M2 while traversing the distance d, so that M1 tells M2 - "Hello, I am here. Now exert the force upon me in this direction." - T seconds? Is T = Infinity or T is finite?

Lets make it easier. Earth is at a distance of 500 light seconds from Sun. It is orbitting the sun. While it was at point A in its orbit, sun has to know of Earth's presence at point A. Does the sun come to know about it instantaneously? Are we saying that gravitational information traverses distances instantaenously and hence faster than electromagnetic wave information?

If yes, then why are we constrained by the speed of light? Why not use gravitational waves to get our information from distant galaxies?

If No, then read further..
So sun comes to know about earth's position some <= 500 seconds. But within that amount of time, the earth has moved and moved a lot to reach a point B. Apparently, in Newtonian model of gravitation, sun's gravitation will not be able to catch up our earth and for that matter any other planet. Yet, our solar system exists. What provides stability to the solar system if gravitational waves take finite time to travel?

Surely there is lot more to Physics and this marvellous universe than our text-books have taught us.